More Stunning Stuff: Where are Blogs Going?

I found these quotes on Technorati’s 2008 Report and since I thought others would be interested too, I share them here:

The Blogosphere is Continuing to Evolve

Technorati asked some of the leading minds on the Blogosphere to give their thoughts on where blogging is headed:

“In 2004 when Technorati started, the typical reaction to the word ‘blog’ was ‘huh – can you repeat yourself?’ Today, blogs are everywhere —even presidential candidates have blogs. The blog has forever changed the way publishing works —now anyone can be a publisher. The issue is no longer distribution; rather, it’s relevance.”

• Brad Feld
• Managing Director
• Foundry Group
• www.feld.com

“The idea of blogging will never disappear, but the process by content is created for one blog or a series of blogs will continue to undergo radical upheavals. This past year, we saw the introduction of countless “microblogging” platforms, to the point where they (themselves) have become a commodity —further pushing individual voices to the Blogosphere’s melting pot. Brand will continue to decentralize, and micro-communities will form within any one of the loosely-structured services (like FriendFeed, which values the continuation of conversation as much as it does the initiation portion).”

“Video will also become increasingly important to convey complex messages that are often lost in text – while audio will continue to fall away to this new medium, save those ‘casts with high production values. YouTube will continue to be the place where most people will view their on-demand Internet video. Live video events will soon saturate the landscape, and our attention will become even further fragmented —lending more credibility for the need to archive and index certain video clips and wrap them with text for Google and other search engines to discover.”

• Chris Pirillo
• Internet Content Producer (Since 1992)
• chris.pirillo.com

“I blog in Spanish and English for different reasons. In English I blog to communicate my ideas and views, in Spanish, where for some unknown reason many more people comment, I write to learn. The collective intelligence of my commentators is greater than mine.”

• Martin Varsavsky
• Founder and CEO
• FON
• english.martinvarsavsky.net
• spanish.martinvarsavsky.net

“Blogs will fill every niche in the ecology of public writing. They’ll be good examples of blogs and a far larger range of sites that are sort-of, kind-of blogs. This is as it should be. It’s also as it already is.”

• David Weinberger
• Writer
• Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center
• Johotheblog.com

“Blogging has gone from a cutting edge, mostly American phenomenon to a global main-stream activity generating an increasing larger share of the world’s ‘user generated content’ and the sharing economy driving up the value of search and advertising worldwide. In addition to increasing in scale, bloggers continue to become increasingly diverse become both a core economic as well as social driver online.”

• Joichi Ito
• CEO, Creative Commons
• Venture Capitalist
• joi.ito.com

“From a journalistic perspective: Blogging and other conversational media are entering a new phase when it comes to community information needs — they’re growing up. Traditional media are using these tools to do better journalism, and are beginning to engage their audiences in the journalism. Entrepreneurial journalists are finding profitable niches. Advertisers are starting to grasp the value of the conversations, and so on. The big issues remain, including the crucial one of trust. Here, too, we’re seeing progress. The best blogs are as trustworthy as any traditional media, if not more. The worst, often offering fact-challenged commentary, are reprehensible and irresponsible. But audiences are learning, perhaps too slowly, that modern media require a more activist approach. We need to be skeptical of everything, but not equally skeptical of everything. We need to use judgement, to get more information — and to go outside our personal comfort zones.”

• Dan Gillmor
• Director
• Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
• Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship
• Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Arizona State University
• startupmedia.org

“The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world.”

• Seth Godin
• Author
• Tribes
• sethgodin.typepad.com

“Blogging is getting easier and easier and some day, we’ll all have blogs of one sort or another. Most won’t look like my blog, maybe more like mytumblog or my twitter feed, but even more likely they’ll look like something else.”

“Earlier this year I wrote on my blog [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/06/my-vision-for-s.html], ‘Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.’ That’s where we are headed and blogging is a big part of that.”

• Fred Wilson
• Managing Partner
• Union Square Ventures
• www.avc.com/a_vc

“Although today’s form of blogging is a volunatary form of self-expression, in the future our experiences, actions, locations, and preferecnes will be auto-recorded directly to the web.”

“The future of blogging will be an auto-synching of our lives directly to the web —often a quiet recording in the background”

• Jeremiah Owyang
• Senior Analyst, Social Computing
• Forrester Research
• web-strategist.com/blog

“Although new ‘right-now’ web tools like twitter and lifestreaming aggregators like friendfeed have shifted some attention from classic blogging, they’ve actually deepened the conversation and made the blog, as a place to comment, reflect, and analyze, more central than ever. Blogging has become part of the daily discourse within many communities, and more and more essential is a growing number of disciplines outside of the technosphere.”

• Susan Mernit
• co-founder, People’s Software Company
• peoplessoftware.com
• susanmernit.com

“Blogs represent the best chance for companies to inform the conversation.”

• Richard Edelman
• President and CEO
• Edelman
• www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/

“Until recently, ‘the Blogosphere’ referred to a small cluster of geeks circled around a single tool. Now it refers to hundreds of millions of people using a vast warehouse of tools that allow people to behave increasingly online like they do in real life. We have entered the Age of Normalization in the Blogosphere.”

• Shel Israel
• Social Media writer & speaker
• co-author, Naked Conversations
• globalneighbourhoods.net

“The Blogosphere has added spice to our democracy, making it more appetizing to more people.”

• Michael Powell
• Senior Advisor
• Providence Equity Partners
• Former FCC Chairman

“The future of blogs will have arrived when you check your favorite blog for sports news in the morning, instead of your local paper.”

• Richard MacManus
• Founder / Editor
• ReadWriteWeb
• www.readwriteweb.com

“Blogging is all about the sharing mindset and voice being expressed. In the future, it will look different and take many forms, but it will always feel the same.”

“Blogging isn’t defined by a technology or the way words are laid out on a page. Rather, it’s a mindset, and as such, will be around for a long, long time, evolving and improving.”

• Charlene Li
• Thought Leader
• Altimeter Group
• www.altimetergroup.com

“The Blogosphere continues to evolve – with micro-blogging, long blogging, video blogging all taking off this year. Of course, more and more companies and politicians are playing with blogs but most importantly, it’s becoming something that more and more ‘civilians’ do – ordinary folk. And that’s what’s going to change its impact from here on in.”

• Mark Earls
• Consultant
• HERDmeister
• Author, Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature
• Former Chair, Global Planning Council, Ogilvy Worldwide
• herd.typepad.com

“Blogging continues to splinter into many different categories, providing an incredibly rich ecosystem of self expression tools and compelling content for readers. The prototypical personal blog, where a single writer simply writes their daily thoughts on their life and/or topics that interest them, will always be hugely popular. But multi-author blogs will continue to thrive as well. And a huge percentage of blogs focus on single topics of interest, from tech news to wine to knitting. Whatever it is you are interested in, it’s likely to have a community of people who share that interest.”

“But perhaps the most interesting development is the steady evolution in the definition of a blog itself. Today photo and video blogs are already common. Microblogging platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed are the fast food equivalent of the blogging world, and continue to gain popularity because they let people update multiple times per day with 140 characters or less on what they are doing, how they’re feeling, etc. Not only is microblogging a terrific method of self expression, the value of the raw data that’s created is enormously important. The Twitter messages I read during the two presidential conventions gave me a good idea on how people reacted to the various speeches. It’s not statistically relevant, but pollsters will be watching that data more and more closely over time.”

“Whatever happens next with blogging, it’s here to stay. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

• Michael Arrington
• Founder
• TechCrunch
• www.techcrunch.com

“In many ways the proliferation of blogging has transformed the 
 venture business — entrepreneurs expect a level of transparency 
 that simply didn’t exist before venture investors started blogging.”

“I can not imagine staying current in this fast moving, high tech world without using blogs and bloggers as a powerful filter of the 
 overwhelming torrent of information we all face.”

• David Hornik
• August Capital
• www.ventureblog.com