The Future Of Blogging: Which Technologies Will Drive The Medium

Blogging has come an extremely long way since its infancy at the beginning of the new millennium’s
first decade.Though the exact number of blogs worldwide is surprisingly hard to pin down, most useful sources, such as Technorati and WordPress are fairly sure  that, worldwide, there are at least 1 billion actively used blogging sites in existence.

The Future Of Blogging

Obviously, most of these hardly garner any viewers at all and many of them are barely refreshed with fresh content. Also, we need to take into account the fact that hundreds of millions of these are probably zombie blogs, run by automated software solely for the sake of spam promotion.

However, whichever way you count the size of the blogosphere, the undeniable fact is that hundreds of millions of active, human updated blogs exist and millions of these have regularly been offering information, news or even services that have deeply impacted the way our social and business landscape operates for several years at least.

In essence, blogging is huge and still growing powerfully as new technology developments arrive to augment or change the medium in different ways. Let’s cover some of these now and see how they’ll affect the future of this massive distributed information reporting marvel.

Increased Blog Use by More People thanks to Social Media

This trend seems obvious enough but the devil is in the details here: Blogging exploded right from the earliest days of its development and was quickly adapted by millions of would-be and established agents, from businesses to activists, as an excellent platform for their existing desire to get the word out about whatever they had to say or share.

However, there were, and still are, millions more people who either never were too comfortable with the idea of publishing their own thoughts and beliefs to a wide online audience or didn’t really understand how to get their own blog up and running and lacked the deeper motivation to learn (it’s really not too complicated).

This is now starting to change in a serious way thanks to social media platforms. Since in essence these networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, really act sort of like closed micro blogging environments and since their popularity practically obligates millions of regular people to start using them, we’re seeing more and more of the world’s average, normally publicity shy web users getting used to the basic idea of posting their personal interests or stories before large audiences of hundreds or even thousands of others. This trend will accelerate, and simplified, social media related new blog platforms will emerge that facilitate it even more.

More Frequent, Shorter Posting thanks to Connected Mobile and Tablet Tech

Another, major technological development that’s been ongoing for the last couple of years and will continue to expand enormously as the second decade of the millennium progresses is the explosive growth of web connected smartphone and tablet use. As more of the world’s 2 billion internet users access the web daily from their mobile devices, having the ability to post content, images and videos instantly, we’re going to see an accelerated trend towards far more frequent but much smaller short-form blog posting. While low on per-post content, the deep value of this new shift in how blog posts are published be its extreme in the moment relevancy; posts will often be published almost literally as they occur in the real world.

The ramifications of this for political, social and business events is enormous. And news or information from places in the world where something major is unfolding will be far more in depth by virtue of sheer volume and freshness of anything published.

Trends in video blogging, social media derived blogs and even more simplified blogging platforms will really flesh out the “just-in-time” blogging possibilities described above.

Video and Video Blogging

Online video is inarguably still in its infancy. There’s plenty of room and need for massive growth, especially given the fact that most consumers actually prefer watching their information in live form instead of reading it.

Given this, we’re going to see a sharp increase in the amount of general video content posted to text based blogs (this is already happening big time), and we’0re also going to see more cases of full-scale transition to purely video based blogs, or vlogs, as they get called by some we commentators.

Thanks to the growing popularity of video calling, video conferencing, and video streaming technologies in general, not only will pure video blogs grow in popularity, they will also in some cases be one-upped still further by something much more interactive: blog posts in the form of video conferences with a live, in the moment communicative connection between audience and blogger.

This could be especially popular with news and business blogging areas where domain owners want to create a sort of call-in viewer conversation environment similar to how radio stations and newscasts sometimes manage their reporting/discussion platforms.

The advantage of doing this with ever-developing off the shelf blogging and video conferencing technology is that the whole thing will be much cheaper than an actual radio or TV news broadcast, allowing millions of people to turn their originally simple text or video blogs into something much more dynamic at next to no cost.

Final Words

We can be sure that blogging isn’t going anywhere; instead it will simply evolve into something stronger, newer and more powerful, augmented by new delivery technologies, social media platforms and blog development systems like simplified CMS platforms and superior video coding systems. Beyond all of these, as a sort of nurturing environment for blogging, there is the general internet itself, spreading further every day and capable of transferring ever more data per second over its connective wires.

About the author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, mobile technology, marketing tech and digital security. He also loves to read and write about subjects as varied as the location free business, portable business management and anything to do with finance. When not busy writing or consulting on technology and digital security, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico, where he spends part of the year. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.