When will blogs no longer be blogs?

On April 22, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

It amazes me how much this space has evolved over the last 5+ years (yes, blogging has been around longer than that, but I’ve only been actively watching/participating in the space for a little over 5 years).

  • Blogging used to be something that was only used by the geek elite.
  • Then 4 or 5 years ago people started talking about how companies could “theoretically” use blogs to communicate directly to their customers.
  • Today it is something that the largest brands and enterprises use as a key tool in their communication arsenal.

I wonder how much more saturation we’ll achieve? Not every company or every person is going to start a blog and by the time everyone is reading blogs will they even be blogs anymore? By then they’ll just be standard features in Web pages and articles.

Blogging Has Come a Long Way, Baby – eMarketer

“Blogs are now mainstream media,” said Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati. “You’re also seeing mainstream media coming in the other direction by adding blog content.”

This point of view is echoed by David Tokheim, of Six Apart Media. “The lines are becoming blurred between a standalone blog that might be created on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress and blog content that’s created by The New York Times.”

eMarketer estimates that in 2009 96.6 million US Internet users will read a blog at least once per month. By 2013, 128.2 million people, or 58% of all US users, will do the same.

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  • Tac,

    very relavant post and blogs have really moved past being simply blogs. MANY people use WordPress.org as their official website. I know I used it when I needed a quick site up. It seems the capability of it has become a CMS of sorts for the social media space.

    This brings up another, broader point beyond blogs but in the way that companies look at technology and interaction. Used to be companies led with CMS, CRM, ERP investments and tacked on "ancillary" social components after. Now, am seeing signs of the opposite with social leading the technology with ties to CMS, CRM afterwards.

    Beyond the technology of any of this, still the biggest inhibitor is cultural adoption of interaction which is the overall point of your post in essence.
  • Tac
    That's a great point Jason. It seems like, esp for small businesses, many are putting the need for social technology ahead of the need for traditional business technologies.
  • First off, I enjoyed reading this article and feel you make some excellent points.

    However I think the argument should be positioned differently, and this is based on my belief/experience over the last 15 years of the web. Blogs in my opinion are just advanced websites with their key feature distinguishing features being that they are social by comparison with traditional database-driven websites.

    History proves this theory as today's websites evolution mimic's a similar technological transition that occurred in the late 90's and early millennium when we switched from websites developed 'page by page' to database driven CMS's. The reality is that what blogs do that was so special is increasingly being absorbed into standard (common) CMS platforms.

    So my question is, how long until the term 'blogs' can only be found on Archive.org as a term of reference like database driven websites which eventually became just plain old 'websites'?
  • Tac
    Roger, I totally agree. I'm still reeling from the news that Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities. I still have some stuff up there somewhere :)

    While I framed my question from the other angle, we're basically asking the same question.
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