Stephen Baker and Heather Green has a great overview on the evolution of blogging. Read that to get a historical overview of bottom-up publishing revolution.

Blogging has influenced many power structures - be it mainstream media, entertainment industry or research based business. By enabling easy publishing and non-intrusive (RSS) reading model, it created classic non-consumption market out of moms, dads and every other average joe who has something interesting to say.

Blogging is in it’s phase 2. It’s purpose and benefits are all clear and mainstream media’s adoption suggests that its now mainstream as well.

Big question is where do we go from here?

Are we going to see innovation in the content (more multi-media and more mashup?), in distribution (more destinations?), in brand/reputation management (blog at the center of your digital identity?). There are more questions than we have answers. There are lot of theories and most of those theories are pushed by startups.

Our existing engagement with blogging tools and blog based media has comfortably plateaued to a good-enough set of functionalities. Why rock the boat when things are working?
I believe our basic needs and increasing fragmentation in media will call for changes in the importance we attach to blog features. Individual needs circle around more money, more fame/brand, more distribution of your identity (SEO juice). ME brand will circle back to your blog. Right now it’s scattered around online destinations which are built for community environments.

Just to test this theory I did a very high level search on three leading search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live) with the keyword “blog”. Just the fact that Google (which is by far the most dominant search engine) places higher importance to personal blog shows how important this type of destination is.

You can compare all three search engine results via PDF files. I saved it so that I can track how this first page result will change in near future.

To be continued..

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Blog Attachmentsgoogle-search-blog.pdf (PDF, 111K)yahoo-search-blog.pdf (PDF, 108K)live-search-blog.pdf (PDF, 114K)

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