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The Future of Blogging - a Collaborative Mindmap

A little over five years ago, sites like Typepad, Blogger and WordPress dazzled by empowering anyone to instantaneously share his or her thoughts with the world; My how times change. Today, however, in a world where thousands of status updates and tweets whiz by our screens every hour, blogging arguably feels slow.

So is blogging dead? It depends on who you ask. After all, TMZ and Mashable are blogs and they’re doing quite well. However, it’s definitely time for a closer examination of the blog – where it sits today and where it’s going.

Over on Mashable we are exploring this further by setting up a mind map that can be edited by anyone who signs up for MindMeister. Please edit it! Tell us what are we missing here. How can we paint a more comprehensive view of where blogging is going? Help us shape the right picture and we’ll report back on what we learned. It's also embedded above.

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4 comments
Jul 07, 2009
Colin Alsheimer said...
Interesting map. I think there will be some combination of darwinism and evolution. There are just too many different tools and platforms that all sort of do the same thing. Who has time to pay attention to all of them?

For personal use, my vote is for lifestreaming, esp. given the developments in mobile phones. It's only going to get easier to create high quality content on the fly, and post it to whatever online account you wish. Personally, I don't have time to maintain a blog with in-depth, lengthy posts - so lifestreaming is a good fit.

For business use, my vote is with the strategy that makes the most sense. For some companies/blogs, a social community makes perfect sense. For others, existing only on social media platforms might be an OK solution. Depends what the goals are.

Jul 07, 2009
James Cherkoff said...
Remember when blogging meant posting three or four times a day!
Jul 07, 2009
Karim said...
I think a big part of the evolution of blog etc, is down to fashion. We had geocities websites before we had blogs, and it's hard to deny that forums were social media websites.

It seems that we're fundamentally doing the same things online albeit through ever-slicker tools. In a way lifestreams remind me a lot of the oldschool geocities pages where people would put up photos of their cats and talk about what they had for lunch.

Jul 08, 2009
Richard Landry said...
FAIL. The Mindmeister site has been down for the last several hours....

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Steve Rubel

Steve Rubel

Steve Rubel (bio) is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman - the world's largest independent PR firm.

He is charged with helping clients identify emerging technologies and trends that can be applied in marketing communications programs. He also explores these topics on his lifestream site, a monthly Forbes.com column and in a bi-weekly AdAge column.

Steve can be reached via email at steverubel@gmail.com.

Note: Everything posted on this site is Steve's personal opinion. It does not represent the views of Edelman or its clients.

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