Forecasting the future of blogging sounds like an exercise in futility, since most seers and soothsayers failed to predict the rise of blogs at all. In fact, at every turn, a significant new player like Facebook or Twitter comes along and completely rearranges the online micropublishing landscape. But just because people can’t necessarily predict the future of blogging doesn’t mean they’re not willing to take a stab at it anyway.
Over at Mashable, Steve Rubel is inviting readers to collaborate on a mind map about the future of blogging. The way he sees it, blogging will either evolve or die (which frankly is the fate of all works of man, right?) Even if you don’t want to contribute to the conversation, you may want to check out the post, and not just to see how badly Rubel butchers the relationship between evolution and Darwinism! Ultimately, consideration of the future of blogging is highly relevant to our collective online exertions. More to the point, if we can imagine where we want blogging to go, we all can start steering in that direction!
Please feel free to comment below on your thoughts about the future of blogging.
6 Comments
I think bloggish content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal are here to stay, and the expectation that most websites will include dynamic content updated from the top will continue to spread. Whether we still call what we do “blogging” five or ten years from now is another question. Personally, I think the sooner we lose the word, the better - it has acquired so many limiting stereotypes. We should speak instaed of nature journaling, online self-publishing, political editorializing, online scrapbook making, etc.
O.K., off to read the article now.
Uh, I can’t resist pointing out the ignorance of this statement: “From my point of view, blogging’s future will likely flow down one of two paths: either it will evolve and grow into something else (like many species have) or it will succumb to Darwinism and become extinct (like the Dodo).”
Dave, your comments, as ever, are insightful. And yes, I thought this crowd in particular would find Rubel’s evolution-Darwinism dichotomy painful.
There is also this sentence trainwreck: “impossible to tell the elephants (journalists) apart from bloggers (zebras).” I don’t have much trouble telling elephants and bloggers apart, nor journalists and zebras.
The trouble with an exercise like this is that the blogosphere has always been fragmented into many topic areas and blogging styles. And fragmentation has increased as more and more people start blogs. I wouldn’t expect all of them to develop in the same direction.
No idea where blogging is going long-term, but I do find this co-evolution of social-networking and information-dispersal fascinating. The generations raised on Sesame Street seem to have no significant attention-span! — they’d rather read a 2-inch blog post on an important science story than a 7 page Scientific American article on it, and that’s a tad scary… speed and brevity, substituting for substance and quality. I’m not sure where it’s all headed (…yet I have to believe that quality, in some way and some new form, will win out in the end).
Blogs seem still in their infancy with a lot of evolving to do. I suspect the really big ones will adapt and sustain an independent presence well into the future, but the commonplace blogs that make up 99% of the current blogosphere may well eventually fall to the wayside, replaced by other forms.