What’s next after Blogging?

The Blogosphere is troubled about the future these days. Already a few days ago, Jeremy Zadow wondered about the peak of Blogging.

Blogging now feels like on-line shopping around the year 2000 or 2001. Most of us no longer think it’s a miracle that it works, a new thing, scary, difficult, hard to understand, etc.

So I’m starting to wonder what the timeline might look like. Roughly when do you expect blogging to go from being „the new thing“ or „the thing that changes/reinvents X“ to just another part of daily life for a bunch of people? …just like on-line shopping.

Just a few hours later, Steve Rubel asked about the future and made some predictions:

1. The Long Tail – small players can collectively make up a market that rivals the giants. As Seth says, small is the new big. This applies equally for journalism as well as for marketers.

2. The Read Write Web/Web 2.0 – technologies like Ajax will make the web more dynamic, turning it into a full-fledged platform. Wither the desktop.

3. Timeshifting – consumers will increasingly want to devour media on their own time, on the mobile device of their choice and without commercials

4. Collaborative Categorization – consumers, using technology, will create their own taxonomies that make it easier to find information. This is sometimes called tagging, social search or folksonomies. However, this is just the beginning.

5. Citizen Marketing – consumers will organize – either on their own or with the help of companies – to evangelize products they love and vilify those they don’t

6. The Daily Me – it’s finally here; RSS, AI and personal search tools will make it easier for people to seek out only the news they care about and tune out all else

7. It’s All a Conversation – as journalism becomes a conversation, so will marketing – just like Cluetrain said.

8. What’s Inside is Outside – mobile devices and consumer generated media mean that whatever a single eye beholds so can the world.

9. Trust Marketing – people will increasingly use social networking technology to tune in messages from individuals they trust (including citizen journalists) and tune out everyone else

10. Decentralized Communication – armies of individual employees will use technology to become the voice of every company; like it or not. The solo singer is dead. Long live the chorus.

The translated german version can be found on Mario Sixtus‘ blog, and Björn Ognibeni expects some ideas by Renee Hopkins Callahan and James Cherkoff to become reality.

I consider these trends as much as possible as future predictions become reality. There’s a chance these things will develop as predicted, but a chance of even height strikes against this. I’m not keen on searching for a specific successor of blogs or social networking software, but I’m willing to try it out once it exists. Unless I don’t make this kind of major step that affects the digitalized human beings, I’m just going to await these changes.