World Blogging Forum Vienna 2010

Maybe it’s not really the best option to write about the future of blogs on a blog, but from other point of view it is the best place for this post as they are not dead, wright?

Many have dis­cussed the state of the blo­gos­phere and the future of blogs lately, even here on this blog/site aggre­gat­ing the thoughts of the active par­tic­i­pants of WBF10.

The blog become a medium that we noone longer asks what it is and how can i rec­og­nize one, that is good. At the same time, the blog was/is under strong attack from SNS and micro-blogging plat­forms that are fos­ter­ing change to its role. Nowa­days you can’t see a per­sonal blog with­out a clear goal or niche topic. Nowa­days you can’t see so many “empty” posts doing noth­ing else but promoting/sharing few links. Nowa­days you see blog posts that are more ana­lytic and detailed, and all that because of the more dynamic chan­nels that are becom­ing more popular.

So within this sce­nario, what is the future of blogs? Well, i’ll quote some of the find­ings of the already men­tioned State of the blo­gos­phere by Technorati:

As Richard Jalichan­dra, pres­i­dent and CEO of Tech­no­rati explained in his open­ing gam­bit, the state of the blo­gos­phere is strong. “I dare say that the blo­gos­phere has grown into a mature media chan­nel,” he said.

Though are many rea­sons for this, one of the key take­aways from 2010’s report is the impor­tance of pro­fes­sional blog­gers. Why is this? Jalichan­dra pointed to the expe­ri­ence of these blog­gers (which means that they have the knowl­edge to pro­duce good con­tent), their mas­sive reach, abil­ity to influ­ence other blog­gers – and their place as a valu­able chan­nel for PRs to pitch.

The scope of the pro­fes­sional has grown this year, as Wendy Hut­ter – senior VP of Penn Schoen Berland (who con­ducted the research) – added. Part-timers, cor­po­rate blog­gers and those who are self-employed are all con­sid­ered part of this cat­e­gory. Two thirds of the 7,200 inter­viewed were male, 65% were aged 18–44 and 11% say blog­ging is their pri­mary income. (via Rep­u­ta­tion Online)

One can expect a CEO of a com­pany that heav­ily relies on blogs to say that the blo­gos­phere is strong but we need to try to be objec­tive, flip the coin and try to real­ize that this is exactly because the num­ber of hob­by­ist blog­gers drop down. I don’t see that as bad thing, i see it as evo­lu­tion. Every medium has to evolve and find it’s new role within the new media ecosystem.

Another research con­cluded ear­lier that the Cor­po­rate Blog­ging Goes Mainstream.

The focus on Twit­ter and Face­book is under­stand­able: they’re nearly uni­ver­sal, they’re eas­ily acces­si­ble via mobile devices, and there’s the abil­ity to instantly con­nect users’ thoughts, actions, and com­ings and goings via those plat­forms. But blog­ging is more than that – or at least has the abil­ity to be more than that.

The first thing is, it’s long form con­tent. It gives com­pa­nies the abil­ity to have a greater nar­ra­tive and develop more nuance around the mes­sage. Sto­ries can be told in ser­ial for­mat so that a  pre­dictable cadence is estab­lished, with reg­u­lar posts on known top­ics. Over time, this builds a rela­tion­ship and per­haps even loy­alty from read­ers. And fun­da­men­tally, mar­ket­ing is about storytelling.

There’s no rea­son your mar­ket­ing efforts have to be an either/or men­tal­ity. If done well, blog­ging can incor­po­rate the ben­e­fits of tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing as well as the new. For exam­ple, inte­grat­ing blog con­tent or head­lines into the cor­po­rate web­site in order to keep it fresh.

The above quoted text is from Scott Monty’s post We’ll always have blog­ging and the data is from eMarketer’s research.

So what is the future of blogs? I would say they are evolv­ing towards the main­stream, and that is not so bad because they are still blogs. What do you think, are blogs chang­ing their essence and role or it is already changed?

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