The Butt Ugly Weblog

Blogging fever only a mild case of flu anymore?

Many of the blogs I read have started to show signs of tiredness lately. Blog entries are becoming shorter, or erratic. Especially with those blogs that are closer to personal diaries, the content seems to grow thinner day by day.

However, blogs more at the weblogging end of the scale seem to be doing well. Witness the coolest thing in a while: Mobitopia. Technology is maturing, and new innovations seem to be built on the basic roadblocks that have already been around for a while: RSS, XML-RPC, etc. For example, there is now the Roogle RSS search engine for searching RSS feeds. Google news is another shining example on the power of weblogging (being a kind of meta-weblog itself).

Of course, personal diaries are not going away, far from it. People have a need for self-expression. But their usefulness is limited, and I don't see much potential for growth and innovation there. This mirrors the situation in the early days of the Web, when everyone just had to have their own personal web page, but it never really got any further than that. Personal content kickstarted the Web, but all of the really interesting innovation happened afterwards. Perhaps the same thing is happening now: personal content is driving weblogs, but soon all of the innovation will come elsewhere.

Who knows. Interesting times these are.