The Future of Blogging

Om Malik has, for as long as I’ve known of him, been a source of brilliant thinking about the web. In a fairly new article, The Evolution of Blogging, he looks at where blogging may be going in future. This has been sitting open as a tab in my browser for some time now, while I mull over it. There are a few parts of the article that really stand out, and I’m going to quote one of those here:

The next generation of blogging systems needs to account for the fact that information — and most importantly, conversations — flow via email, Twitter, instant messages and other formats.

This, to my thinking, is very, very insightful. Obviously, you can draw connections with Google Wave, but there are going to be lots of conversations that are going on elsewhere too - in older IM programs, in threads of comments on existing blogs, on message boards, IRC channels, whispers and guild channels in MMOs, and all manner of other media.

So I think that if someone can construct a mechanism, of whatever kind it can be, which will ‘translate’ data from one of these media to another, and make it available for use in blogs and other ‘published’ forms, it will be enormously successful. I don’t know if that’s something which will happen via the Wave API, right down at the protocol level, or something I haven’t even considered, but it’s going to be necessary.