It wasn’t too long ago when my poll asking if blogging was dying concluded with an astounding NO. BookTwo.org recently published an article highlighting a change that is taking place within the blogosphere.
I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic. Some of these may be fed through the blog, like Booktwo’s RSS links, but it’s all getting a bit bitty. “I think RSS is one of the main reasons for this (perceived) decline in blogging. We don’t visit each others’ sites, so it’s less obvious when the frequency declines. As more small social apps like Twitter, and larger ones like Facebook, increase their reach, we don’t need blogs as our home pages either.
“It’s good to have a place to put these things, thoughts, articles &c. But I think it’s time, and I think it’s happening, that the delivery mechanism was stripped down. RSS might be the answer: people are starting to have ‘lifefeeds’ more and more, which aggregate everything they’re doing.
Unfortunately, BookTwo is on to something. What’s also interesting to note, is that this article falls in line with Steve Spaldings take on where blogging is heading.
Microblogging will be the critical change in the way we write in Web 3.0. Imagine a world where your mobile phone, your email, and you television could all produce feedback that could easily be pushed to any or all blogging platforms. If you take a picture from your smart-phone, it would be automatically tagged, bagged and forwarded to your “lifestream”. If you rated a television show that you were watching, your review would be forwarded into the stream.
This is the type of seamless integration that will finally bring the concept of blogging to the masses. Posts will become shorter and more topical, the world of rehashing the meme will be replaced by one where life and news generation go hand in hand. Blogging won’t be a hobby reserved for internet enthusiasts, but a past time for the MySpace generation.
Of course, the allure of any individual blog would be much more limited. As the popularity of micro-blogging explodes, more and more basically “unreadable” blog will start to populate the blogosphere. It’s not hard to imagine a world where the vast majority of your posts amount to, “stuck in traffic, ugh…”
That last sentence in Steves take on blogging is the one that concerns me the most. The last thing I want the blogosphere to turn into is a series of links with little substance. I want to see bloggers continue to write their opinions, reporting on things in their own way, and continue to be the driving force behind new media. I want to continue to see quality content written by someone other than big media properties. Continue to blog and if you need to share links, create a link blog as I illustrated how to do in a previous article.
I don’t want to see everyone’s blog turn into a lifestream of links. Do you?
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
I actually tend to think there is a big future in the life stream. Obviously if blogging devolves into a stream of twitters and links then that would be a great loss, but I think the two things are very different.
Not everyone can blog, and most people lack the motivation anyway. The beauty of a lifestream is the automatic nature of them and the value is in having a scrapbook of interesting links and thoughts.
Will this have value for others though? At the moment it’s hard to see how, but I think the answer will be yes.
I imagine that with tagging and other metadata being automatically appended it will be possible to fiter this content in a useful way. You may not want to add any of their RSS feeds to your reader, but some kind of ‘Google Trends’ service could produce interesting and up to date information about what is interesting, and what your friends are saying about it.
It won’t be about quality writing, but it will be a new wave of communication. Services like Jaiku, Tumblr, Twitter, FriendFeed and Profilactic are springing up everywhere right now because they can sense that there is something valuable to all this.
And in time, there will be.
Ooh, you got on Mashable! And he makes the same points I made :)
All the talk of ‘Web 3.0’ and ‘Web 4.0’ made me want to punch someone though…
Ditto Foomandoonian. The web 2.0 cliche I can deal with, but all this bs about web x.0 is too much cliche to handle.
Then you have people coining terms like Enterprise 2.0
Soon we will have web 3.0 BETA… the mandatory BETA seems to have been left off.
Actually, come to think of it, logically web 2.1 would be next.
@Foomandoonian LOL. I suppose I have moved up in the ranks of the blogosphere if I end up as a link on Mashable.com Or maybe not.
At any rate, I also think there will be a big market for Lifestreaming. I think of it as each person becoming their own brand. That brand is identified by that person’s lifestream.
All I’m saying with this article is that, I want to continue to read quality writing and I don’t want to see nothing but links pointing all over the place. For example, I’d much rather see blogs just slap a LinkRoll onto the sidebar of their blog so they can continue to write and share links rather than turning into a legit link farm.