Weblogging a fading fad?

Well, the question did turn up in a late-night conversation. Is blogging a fading fad?

I think the question is moot now, with the upcoming AOL Journals. (Another review by Jeff Jarvis.) AOL seems to be pulling all the right strings: they support RSS out of the box, have direct IM blogging, photoblogging, etc, but something worries me:

The feature list, though, is of secondary importance, compared to AOL's ability to offer a blogging platform to tens of millions of people at once. I was there during the "AOL offers usenet access" days in the early 90s, and that was like watching someone turn the lights on at a baseball stadium.

Yeah, I remember the onslaught of people who came over to the Finnish USENET newsgroups and started screaming because we were not writing in English. They all thought it was a part of AOL. Which was scary. And it transformed USENET. The question is now, how much power does AOL have to transform the blogosphere?

By the end of this year, blogging will be mainstream. But will it be blogging anymore? And will the blogosphere survive?



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"Main_blogentry_070703_3" last changed on 07-Jul-2003 15:33:25 EEST by JanneJalkanen.
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