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Embedded in most current blogging software is an odd notion. Because the systems are self-referential and the overall audience is in its early growth stages, there is an interesting assumption that one "blogs" for oneself or other bloggers. Conventions, like blogrolling (a cross linking scheme that builds traffic within the blogging community), have a nearly religious fervor associated with them.
Community building, as we've mentioned in other Blog Notes creates the essential social infrastructure on which the long term success of blogging rests. As the community voraciously consumes the product of other community members, a momentum develops. It's good for groundwork and subject to replacement at the beginning of the second phase of growth in the phenomenon.
Part of the difficulty ion understanding the real long term implications of this (or any technology) is learning to distinguish between bootstrapping mechanisms and the final ediface. The issue has large implications for the development community and is one of the flaws in an open source approach. Things that are useful in the bootstrapping of an approach *do* become irrelevant in later phases.
The challenge, as blogging moves towards the mainstream, includes figuring out who the end customers are. They could be bigger and better versions of the current blogging community. They are more likely to be my Mother and behind the firewalls large corporate users. The features that remain in later versions will be a function of the majority of users at that time.
So, the question is "How does an open source movement account for future customers?"
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