I've written elsewhere about what I think will happen, must happen, to weblogs before they'll be ready for business prime-time. I am less certain about what the future holds for personal weblogs, but I thought it would be fun to guess.
One thing I am certain about is that neither Microsoft, nor we pioneer bloggers. will determine this future. In the world of consumer products, everything affects everything else, so we need to take a step back and look at how the mainstream are going to be presented with, and use (or not) weblogs. Here's what I think will happen:
- The television and the PC are going to converge one way or another; their functionality overlaps too much, and they have too much to offer each other, for anything else to happen. The killer apps that will pull them together will be interactive apps: games, the videophone, polls (for American Idol candidates, not the POTUS, yet), shopping, directories/catalogues, and the ability to change cameras, pan and tilt when watching sporting events, travelogues etc. Whether broadcasting as we know it still exists in 2010 will depend on both the stubbornness and innovation of broadcasters.
- The weblog will be one of the suite of apps that will be made available to all with TV/PC convergence, probably as a non-killer freebie. Each user will get a simple word processing/publishing app that will allow them to write letters (and stories and essays) with embedded graphics and send them off via e-mail, while saving them in either a private or public indexable archive. The public archive will be the 'vanilla' weblog of 2010. People who want more 'publishing power' will be able to purchase add-ons, and those who write for the reasons we do, who have not already discovered weblogs, will sign up for these. Even if that's only 10% of the population, that's 600 million blogs, public archives that will subsume personal websites and constitute at least half, maybe as much as 90% of all the content on the internet.
- Weblogs will be indexed and categorized and rated and promoted by many groups in many ways for many purposes. As Shirky's power law prevails, anyone who wants their weblog to be seen by a significant audience will attempt to get it rated by a recognized authority, and those authorities and that recognition will inevitably be more formal than today's A-lister blogrolls, and probably more democratic as well. This will allow a select few to break through to prominence. But for the vast majority, if you want to be read you'll have to do, by analogy, what writers did in the past -- get your writing published in one of the select (e-)journals that have an established audience. There's just too much competition to be discovered serendipitously, no matter how good you are at self-promotion.
- Some weblogs will achieve fifteen minutes of fame. Although most of us will settle for obscurity and readership of less than 150 (the magic number of close acquaintances any of us can hope to muster per the Tipping Point), there will be break-out blogs that will achieve fleeting fame for some special research, insight or artistic creation that is unique and original, not available anywhere else. First to blog intelligently about the next Matrix movie or Harry Potter book will be as famous as the producer of a small break-out indy film or recording. For awhile. In fact, nextgen weblogs might be the tool of choice for promoting your indy film or recording as well.
- Weblogs will also serve as proxies, place-holders for you, for when other people are looking to establish or join a community of interest on any subject under the sun that human beings might care about. If you live with a unique type of dog, or have some unusual disease, or write songs about or photograph body piercings, expect to be found and contacted by all the others that share that joy, fate or interest. In the future we will wheel in and out of communities as often and as easily as we change our shoes. And as dictated by our attention economy, 90% of the communities to which we belong will be inactive 90% of the time. But be aware of the strength of weak ties -- they will play a major role in determining which relationships and communities most impact your life.
- Blogging will be much easier, but few will do it. I base this prediction on the large number of young people who have abandoned their blogs. Blogging is hard work even if the tool is as easy to use as a pencil, and it can't compete with chat or IM (especially as these go multimedia) for the immediacy and intimacy of communication. And that will remain true even if in the future only techies will need or want to write HTML code. The only acronym we'll need to know in 2010 is WYSIWYG.
This has some interesting implications for application developers and for consumers as well. It is not inconceivable that whetever becomes the standard text editor/publishing tool by 2010 (see point 2 above) might replace MS Word as the ubiquitous PC app that all others must export to/import from. Given the bloat and HTML-unfriendliness of Word, that would be a welcome change. In addition, if people start using TVs as IP videophones (especially if it's a PIP option so I can still watch my quirky movies) expect to see convergence of e-mail addresses and phone numbers, or at least some transparent mechanism for getting one from the other.
So, bottom line, blogging's going to get easier, more interesting, and more ubiquitous. But it will still be lonely, and hard to become popular. Some things never change.
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Sunday, July 20, 2003
