I shared my disappointment with Scoble’s prediction as to the future direction of blogs, a week ago. He didn’t take too nicely to my critique of his opinion, but I said at that time that I would send out a dozen or so e-mails asking the opinion of some other bloggers I thought would better fit the role of a creative psychic.
As expected and completely understood, only a few responded. Thankfully, one response from our friend, Collis Ta’eed at FreelanceSwitch, was quite thoughtful and I’ll share a few excerpts of it, along with Neil Patel’s from Pronet Advertising, an amusing response from Seth, and my own.
Neil Patel - Pronet Advertising
“The blog of the future to me is a more social place. I see a mixture between social networking and blogging. We currently are seeing a bit more of this with Facebook, Myspace, and widgets like MyBlogLog, but I see the blogging community more intertwined in the future. Hopfully this entails more than just putting a face to each reader, but actually getting to know each and every reader on a personal level.”
Collis Ta’eed - FreelanceSwitch
“Trend #1 - Making a Business Out of It
Personally I imagine sites creating products that hit their niches, so for FreelanceSwitch - a blog that I work on - I find myself thinking about what our readership wants / needs and how we can fulfill that in a fashion that generates revenue.
Currently we are writing a book about freelancing, but in the future we are considering web applications made specifically for freelancers as well as services like talent directories, portfolio review and so on that would be applicable.
So to extrapolate, I imagine other major blogs might start expanding out of just blogging and find other ways to provide service. In this way commercial blogs are quietly graduating into something else entirely.
Trend #2 - Better Advertising
Think about magazines and how advertising is large format, and interesting. Like you turn the page, see an ad for jaguar and actually read the copy. I’d like to try large ads on FSw, like 500x500px with proper copy on them. Of course maybe that won’t work, maybe it will, we’ll see.
My point here is that advertising will get smarter, more personalized and more suited to blogs.”
Seth Godin - aka Seth Godin
“I have no clue. I’m sorry, Travis.”
I found that to be hilarious. : ) I’m sure Seth speaks for many who let the crazy futurists, such as us, worry about stuff like this.
My thoughts
Blogging as a whole, has quite rapidly gained ground on traditional journalism, and to some extent, become the Wikipedia of ideas and opinions. I think you’ll see blogging edge quite close, over the next several years, to replacing newspapers and televised news, as a source of daily information.
To access all that information, an aggregator of some sort is required to read, filter, sort, and display, based upon your likes and dislikes. This aggregator will be a primary source of traffic for many blogs in the same sense that social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, etc… are today. Netvibes and Google Reader are just the tip of the iceberg in this game. An entirely new platform will change the way you subscribe to blog content, read it, and the motivation behind bloggers to be a part of it.
Imagine a more graphical display of the content in your own personal portal. Techmeme + Popurls + Digg - All the clutter ÷ Anything you want = News, whose display is as customizable as your MySpace page.
Two of the most important and desired things in a community/blog are Reputation and Recognition. I can see a universal system, like what OpenID is trying to do with user identities, provide a network for all blogging applications to track your comments, feedback from other readers, and interests. This information will tail you on every blog you visit, affect the hierarchy of your opinions/contributions, weed out the trash talkers, and create a sense of achievement.
It would follow you in the same way that a Gravatar does, or MyBlogLog, and enable you to track all of the conversations you’ve been a part of in the thousands of blogs you may have commented on, any new comments since your last visit, your reputation, friends, etc… all on one central website. It’s essentially THE social network of blogs.
Design wise, blogs will replicate the themed layouts that major publications have used for decades. The imagery, typography, and layout, will be art directed for each article to simulate a print spread much closer then we’re able to today. Sites like A Brief Message have begun such a journey, and articles like CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing on A List Apart, show signs of such a direction not too far down the road. The content will break out of it’s one-column standards and the theme and elements surrounding it will tie into the article.
Smaller blogs and themes developed for them, won’t have the resources to art direct each article, but they will have several different layout variations for their homepage, articles, and pages, which they can choose from when composing an entry. Creates a much needed variety in presentation, customized to fit the context of the content.
I could go on for ages about how I think stories will evolve in the “Blog of the Future”, the different mediums it’ll be distributed in, deeper levels of feedback from readers, and the technical side behind it all — but I’ll call it a day, for now.
Your thoughts
A couple of you shared your opinions in the post that lead to this, and I thank you, Travis Young, Satish, and Szombat, for doing so. It seemed that Scrivs from 9rules was going to send in his ideas, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever receive that. If I do, or any of you post some interesting views in the comments, I’ll try to update this post.
Bonus brownie points for anyone that can figure out the idea behind the large image up top and how it ties into this post
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