David Weinberger has some predictions about what will happen as blogs become more popular:
While there are a hell of a lot of blogs and blog readers, blogs aren’t even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It’ll happen. And here are some guesses (note: guesses) about what they’ll look like when they do:
- The word “blog” will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it’s more permanent than IM, it’ll be a blog.
- Group blogs will be at least as common as individual blogs. Most people don’t have time to stoke the blogfires every day, but groups do.
- The lines between blogs and discussions will blur. Contributing to a blog discussion requires less effort than creating your own and taking the initiative to come up with topics every day or so.
- The lines between email and blogs will blur.
- Corollary: Closed circulation blogs will become as important as open blogs.
- Corollary: Many blogs will be event-based and time-limited.
- Blogrolls and buddy lists will thoroughly merge somehow.
- The distinction between the big, high-traffic blogs and the rest of the world of blogging will be increasingly sharply etched. The “tail” will gain more and more value as the number of high-traffic blogs necessarily grows much more slowly.
- Blogs will be of increasing value to democracy.
Visit Joho the Blog for the complete entry.
By the way, I recently linked to David’s continuous blogging of the PopTech conference he was attending. At the same time, I was also following Liz Lawley’s continuous blogging of the Association of Internet Researchers conference she was blogging. I meant to link to her too. The experience of vicariously attending two Internetty conferences via the reportage of two brilliants bloggers was rather exhilarating. It was hard to keep up and I wasn’t even distracted by real live speakers, travel, or other inconveniences.
To read through Lawley’s comments, you can start with the most recent (although there’s a related social one right after and even the following post, about reentry into real life, if relevant), or just do a search on ‘aoir’ at mamamusings.