I’ve been writing to Deckchairs for about 1,000 years and now everywhere I look, blogs appear. It’s remarkable that weblogs, bloggers, blogs, blogging, war-blogging, etc. have taken on a life of their own and are not a component of the “Internet” or “Web design” or “Content Management.”
But blogs like Deckchairs are pretty old school. My intuition about blogging is that, as business blogs grow and more CEOs, personalities, and corporations use blogging on their sites, personal blogs will increasingly look small, petty, and possibly N/A. Everything technological today moves from the personal to the socio-political: cellular phones to ringtones, downloadable files to digital piracy, recycling to full-on green cars, pirate radio to podcasting and mixability.
A few mild moments in time to prove my point:
Business Week’s cover story is all about how blogs will change big business. I think they’re right. And one way I know they’re right is that because the online article is more interesting, comprehensive, and carefully formatted than the newstand edition, which looks like a bad Rolling Stone layout. In the online version, you can actually read the article, click to related links, and get a sense of the transition from the personal to the corporate. The magazine is also launching its own Blogspotting site.
A newish company called, sadly, Othx aims to pull personal weblogs into its fold. You can pay for being featured higher up in their search rankings and they act as a kind of oddly commercial warehouse for personality-driven blogs. Nice idea but you know that personal blogging is over when sites like this crop up. I signed up!
Yahoo has a new News interface that they’re trying out. It’s pretty great and one of the reasons is because it doesn’t look like a blog. It’s Amazon-like tabbed interface makes reading news easier and it will be a great tool once it’s fully RSS-enabled (which will be very soon) and corporatized.