The Evangelical Outpost looks ahead to the end of the election and offers his predictions on where blogging could go.
From Bipartisan to Intra-partisan
The mainstream media backlash
The incredibly shrinking blogosphere
Glen Reynolds will become even more powerful
International bloggers will have an opening
The flow of traffic will change
Blogs begin to know their role
Religion can rise
Most of these issues address US blogs, and there are some points I can agree or identify with.
I don’t think the mainstream media will have a backlash.
That may be an issues a bit in the US, but media continues to notice and utilize blogs in other countires.
International bloggers are already here, and better organized - there may be more dialogue of a non-political nature opening up. Or not.
I mentioned on more than one occasion that pundit bloggers will lose traffic or stop after the election but I don’t think the blogosphere will shrink. Different voices will continue to come online with other topics. The teen group journal market is huge. Japan predicts 1 million new blogs by 2005.
We saw an increase in pundits during the Iraq war build up. And a quick drop off.
Bloggers (non-pundit) seem to be quite comfortable with their role. Biz blogs may well grab attention. teen blogs will increase. I think pundit blogs will undergo the changes.
God-blogs have key bloggers in the Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, Orthodox sectors. I think there will be plenty of opportunity for the rise of quality new voices, and many may well be non-US. Some of that growth will be dependent on availablity of technology in other countries, and our willingness to engage new bloggers while being more respectful of culture.
I stated several months ago that the intensity and growth of pundit blogs for this election was preditable and would end in November.
Joes says:
Regardless of who is making changes in the Oval Office, the changes in the blogosphere will be unique and unprecedented. Only time will tell if my predictions pan out. But one thing is for certain. While everything may be politics, politics isn’t everything.
I see the blogosphere as cyclic - and it’s evolution slow and steady and not quite as dramatic as Joe has seen it. What has been happening in the election and will happen in the White House will affect pundit bloggers numbers and hits.
There will be barely a ripple elsewhere in the blogospherre.
What will happens in 2005 (in the blogosphere) if history slows down.
I don’t think history will slow down, but with US elections completed, blogs and topics may be looked at by different people in broader ways in and without the US.
What do you think?
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I’m not in any position to make predictions about the future, BD — my judgement of where blogging *is* doesn’t seem to coincide with anyone else’s, so my predictions are unlikely to be accurate!
But I do foresee that some people who now blog will stop doing it in the next 5 years. And there will be others who don’t blog who will start. ;o)
Yeah, un-educated guesses using prior trends on my part.
I think you make sense:
**some people who now blog will stop doing it in the next 5 years. And there will be others who don’t blog who will start**
LoL. Everything has to fit in slots. We can hope the technology remains accessable, but I left that out because I don’t know if it will. And as for relationships, it is an idealistic hope. Blog on!
my blogging was never about politics, per se - but culture and religion and health care. politics influence these, and my profession is always politically in trouble (in the USA at least) but I have found most of the political blogs to be, frankly, boring. What I have found useful from them is that they bring forth the stories and the back stories that the mainstream media overlook or ignore. An example of that was what really did happen when John Kerry spoke in Steubenville OH (home of extremely Catholic Franciscan University). Given the strong traditionally Democratic nature of that area of the nation (organized labor etc) and the equally strong pro-life nature of the students and professors at Franciscan, I expected there to be a bit of a confrontation - and there was according to local print sources and various bloggers. But the TV and radio coverage (what little there was) seems to have been concentrated on Kerry’s message not on the interactions between Kerry and the townfolk.
Similarly the rapid dissemination of the AP’s ‘error’ reporting that Bush followers had supposedly booed about Mr. Clinton’s heart surgery. Blogs have the capability to call into question the veracity of the traditional news media - but blogs can also be some what mendacious in their coverage and interpretations.
I don’t disagree there are mendacious bloggers.
Individual intrepretation varies widely in any single event - which makes the job of journalism interesting and blogs even more interesting.
It quite depends on the bloggers agenda, and we don’t have to pretend ‘objectivity’.
Bloggers can question the veracity of media, I suppose the ‘how’ of that is the rub.
Odd, I have reached a high level of weariness with pundit blogs. I have not even attempted to discern why. Blog on!
I personally think it is a labelling error to say “predictions on where blogging could go.”
Blogging is just a medium with microscopic barriers to entry. Some blogging is the equivalent of a person with a loudspeaker in a public space: “Listen up! This is what I think!”
The two features that makes blogging unique (in my view) are (1) searchability–the capacity to ask of this enormous repositiory of keystrokes for some particlar set–which is how blogging differs from say both private journals and printed media.
(2) print-based or permanency. This is where it differs from radio or tv.
So “blogging”–the exponential growth? I’ve started 7 and abandoned all but two. But the five live on–while I’m not adding I haven’t dumped them off the server either, and besides they’d probably still exist in the wayback machine or something.