I propose the future of a blog as a cultural center.

In our case, the purpose of our blog in is to communicate culture and teach our team of contractors those things they may or may not know about running a micro business. Since our team is our core business (happy team, happy clients), the question that drives our blog is simple, “how do you propagate culture among a virtual team?” It began because we found ourselves often repeating the same things – your invoices need to look like this – yes, you need to clock your time and on and on. Tired of repeating camp fire lore, we wrote it down. What we found was a social happening taking place. Our blog has turned into a filter, helping us identify people who fit well and encouraging debate, dialog and education. It is becoming a center for shared culture.

As Eric, one of our contractors told me today, “One thing I like about your blog is that it really makes me question my decisions.”

So I put forward that we will have commercial blogs like FSw whose purpose is to monetize and we will have commercial blogs whose purpose is to build community, esteem and credibility to support a business cause.

Our next plan, once we finish our redesign, is to build in a social networking tool for our core contractors. The purpose, to strengthen the bonds of a widely spread team. An issue which is gaining significant prominence as the trend to work remotely continues to grow.

In the year 2000, all bloggers will disregard all of our opinions and either enroll in a copywriting course or use the visual approach, pictures only.

When all is said and done, content is KING, but how you read it is just as important.

I forget the exact stats, but there are so many tens of thousands of books published each year, of which only a few dozen make the best-sellers list and come anywhere near 1 million in sales.

Does that mean the content of every single book that didn’t make the list sucked? No, but something as simple as it’s cover (presentation) would have instantly classified it as either a must-have or destined for the clearance bin.

There are still millions of people that use Livejournal and MySpace as their blogging platforms. All of us Young Go Getters may have been in the game for years, but as Ann Handley said in her interview yesterday, the mass majority still don’t know what a blog is. You can’t forget that.

So we have a lot of power in our hands to control the evolution of this still somewhat new medium.

I’d just honestly love to see things move towards a more usable and accessible nature where bloggers care about the web development part of their blog and want to do better. “Damn, I could use a redesign” or “I really wish I could rank higher on search engines” coming from people no where near the dev industry would make me smile.

Also, when I first read Neil’s thoughts my initial reaction was defiant, but thinking about it, it’s a good call. A face to every name. It’s like you know your personal friends and family, but readers would be more like the people you “know of”. You wouldn’t necessarily talk to them everyday or even acknowledge some of them as you pass by, but you know their face.

And lastly, the image- looks like Conan. I’m not a fan, but I assume he did some stupid “future” monologue. My best guess ;)

Seth’s good at packing a lot of insight into just a few words. We still love him though.

But, as I said (thanks for the link :)), what the answer is lies not with 1 person alone anywhere. It will be a communal effort, and it’s coming sooner than we think.

Love Seth’s response. Of course he doesn’t know, he’s on the wrong boat just like me (on TypePad, while I’m on Blogger…).