Blogging's Future: Up, Up and Away?

Beyond a doubt, blogging has a bright future. It's tempting to get carried away by all the exuberance being generated.

Bill Gates says blogging "will essentially change how we document our lives". Technorati's CEO David Sifry says that there are 11 journal posts being ready-made every second!

While this may well be true, we must resist the temptation to get carried away. Let's analyze blogging's prospects as a 'personal technology', or a technology that individuals use to improve their effectiveness or productivity, or just to have fun.

All flourishing personal technologies that gain widespread use (be it the humble pen, the telephone or the iPod), bear certain hallmarks: they are easy to use, fulfil a basic need, and provide a new way to express an existing behavior or habit. Technologies that do the cut on these three respects tend to 'take-off', with their use stormy steeply*.

Blogging for sure fulfils a basic need, the need for self-expression and societal interaction. It is likewise much powerful in many an respects than else technologies that meet similar of necessity - the telephone, email or online chatting - in that it is much 'permanent', and allows visibility to anyone who can access the Web. It likewise provides a new way to exercise our natural propensity to form groups with like-minded folks, by allowing us to form 'virtual communities' on the Web. It likewise allows folk to 'discover' others with similar tastes, where they may be in the world.

Well, that leaves ease of use. I am afraid blogging is somewhat less stellar in this respect - spell it is simpler than creating personal Web pages, it still lags far behind the telephone and email in ease of use. So, ease of use is the 1st thing that of necessity to improve just about blogs (I hope the journal tool-makers are listening).

If one is tempted to argue that blogging is already really successful, one only of necessity to pause to consider the numbers: by most estimates there are about 80 million blogs in the earth as of today, spell the number of telephones world-wide (fixed-line and mobile) is about 2 billion. This is not to take thing away from the success of blogging, but only to establish (an confessedly somewhat crude) benchmark!

However, we've looked at only half the image so far - becoming successful. Success brings its own problems, and sure enough, blogging too wish need to overcome a couple of challenges that success brings with it:

Better route to manage 'blog clutter'.

Even with the current number of blogs out there, it is becoming difficult for folk to navigate the blogosphere. Telephones or email don't need to solve this problem as they are 'push' technologies, which means that you *want* to restrict who can contact you victimisation these technologies. However, if blogs are to truly live up to their promise of allowing the 'discovery' of like-minded folks, then journal search engines should (and will) get smarter.

Search is of course not the only way to manage clutter - for example, Business Week's Heather Green talks just about creating 'influential blogger' lists.

Blogging of necessity to find route to modify diverse communication of necessity

Blogging tools already do a half-decent job of allowing the sharing of digital content. However, as camera phones proliferate, sharing images and movies wish progressively become mainstream. Likewise blogging from heterogenous devices (phones and house appliances move to mind) is likely to need support.

Of course, this piece only addresses blogging as a 'personal technology'. Analysis of its prospects in business - which are fledgling at the moment - is the subject of a some discussion altogether!

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*This is driven by Metcalfe's Law, which holds that the utility of thing increases exponentially as the number of users goes up.

About The Author

Dr. V P Kochikar’s (read his journal at www.webquarters.com) current areas of interest are in Strategic Foresight, the Impact of Technology on Business and Society, Psychological feature Management and Technology Risk Management. He has publicized wide and serves on the editorial consultive boards and review panels for some international journals and conferences. He has likewise lectured in a guest capacity at business schools and industry fora in India, the US and the UK. Dr Kochikar has been profiled by Psychological feature Management Review magazine, and interviewed by, among others, BBC, Business Now magazine, and the Economic Times. He holds a PhD from IIT Madras, a Bachelor’s in Technology from IIT City and a Master’s in Technology from IISc, Bangalore. Dr. Kochikar is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Information Resources Management Association (IRMA).