I foresee a future where most people will choose media vehicles (or a mix of) to represent themselves in cyberspace. In the beginning, it was .txt files on Gopher. Then it was HTML. Then blogs hit the scene, and with their relative ease of entry for the nontechnical, they exploded. Now, after the miniboom of audio podcasts, video is exploding. What I’ve seen with each wave is a crest of adoption where everyone wants a go, then eventually a large group gets bored or distracted by the “next thing” and moves on, leaving a certain group to remain.

And I think it’s relevant that “blogging” is really just a word for simplified web publishing, and that it is upon this platform that many people publish their video, audio, and other digital media - we’ve even invented terms to pigeonhole them by genre like “vlogs” and “plogs” (video and picture blogs, respectively). I think your entry assumes “blogs” to be primarily text but I see blogs as far more yet less - just an easy way for an untrained person to get their content on the web.

The web enables us to access the entire blogosphere through a click, a truly unique human experience that we’ve really never had before. In the past, the nontechnical folks were kept out of the space by the knowledge barrier and a dependence upon coders to get their ideas out there. Now there’s no barrier so the web is seemingly overrun with blogs. It’s like the blog reader is floating above a massive anthill trying to distinguish the ants from one another, but really can’t differentiate any of them except the exceptional – the ones carrying bits of food. These bits of food are the unique content, the original ideas, the natural talent and the surprising approaches. These are the things that will differentiate some blogs from the masses.

Truly, blogs are beginning to become representative of the population, and, sadly, much of the population doesn’t have anything particularly original to say, much less every day. Many bloggers depend on the echo chamber to keep their momentum going. For my part, I quit blogging in 2002 because I realized that my content wasn’t original enough to merit the kind of readership I wanted. It was a tough decision, because I thought I was an original guy with a good head on my shoulders, but more people had more time to devote to blogging and I chose life in reality over life online.

I think a lot of people will make this choice as they realize that they’re just drops in the online ocean, but this won’t be the death of blogs, it will be the new renaissance of blogging.

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