gaze into the crystal ball

gaze into the crystal ball

Blogs have slowly been gaining in popularity over the last several years. Some of the more widely-read blogs are now viewed as equivalent to journalists and dozens are currently accredited and covering the Democratic convention.

Bloggers and journalists have a sort of symbiotic relationship right now. Journalists provide fodder for blogging, and bloggers provide extensive fact- and bias-checking for journalists.

But nothing lasts forever, and as the numbers of bloggers rise and blogging itself changes, the relationship of blogging to journalism will change.

Blogs are many things: online diaries, link collections, online photojournals, and of course editorial comment aplenty. That's today though. What will they be a few years down the road?

One hint lies in some of the more popular blogs like instapundit. In the right margin above his buttons and blogroll are several advertisements, as well as a tip jar. This is one of the key ways that blogs will change over the next year or two: more and more of the top blogs will have ads in the margins.

I look at my blog, and I see some comics, some editorials of my own, the Robot Guy News which mines 300 newspapers for top stories, and my blogroll which links to other blogs; other than getting paid for this by having ads and a tip jar, this page is pretty much an online newspaper in its own right. A very small newspaper, but you're reading it, aren't you?

I can see blogs in a year or two beginning to compete directly with newspapers for advertising revenue, particularly the top few dozen. Some people will be able to make blogging their primary occupation; basically editing and publishing their own newspaper several times a day. That will be the biggest change to the blogosphere, and it is made possible by the advertisements.

Hmmm.... think I'll look into Blogads.

addendum: I recalled the TV show Max Headroom sometime after I posted the above, and realized that bloggers can soon compete with television news as well; just so long as cellphone technology continues to improve. When you see bloggers regularly uploading video taken with a cellphone, live coverage of news stories as they happen, the days of bloggers competing with TV news will have arrived. And again, the key is advertising.