Interesting article here about whether people will still be using the term BLOG next year. Some think people will lose the word blog and start to go with a traditional “website” tag.
The article No Blogs Next Year talks about just that!
“Next year the whole blog phenomenon will slowly fold back into the core of the Web. The fascinating thing, though, is the opening of the content floodgates. Certainly, Gawker’s properties are written by professionals. But their inclusion into Yahoo! News is part of a larger initiative by Yahoo! to integrate what it calls social media into its offering. That’s intriguing and exciting, as it represents a real new source of interesting content, narrative, and opinion. You just won’t call it a blog.”
Personally I don´t agree with this article at all beyond making some good points about making it easier for you to advertise on blogs in the future (when there is money to be made you can always count on that). Secondly for companies like Gawker now integrating their content with more traditional media, there may be benefits to losing the blog “tag” and just calling yourself a regular website with featured content. For the other 100 zillion other blogs out there that do not have those luxuries the BLOG tag will stick.
Beyond BlogExplosion being heavily invested in the word BLOG in all of our domains, we look to one obvious and simple reason to reach our own conclusions about the future use of the word BLOG.
The word BLOG is short (4 letters) and is easy to say, recognize and pronounce no matter what part of the world you are from. If you watch TV these days you see the word BLOG being used all the time. The word BLOG actually means something to people especially when you compare it to a term like RSS (nothing simple about this syndication) which generally does not mean anything at all to people except some technical term. Studies have indicated the term blog has seen improved awareness despite the fact that many people don´t even know they are visiting a blog. To me that tells me the word BLOG will be here with us for a very long time still. That word association will not go away anytime soon.
So in conclusion although the way you view and find blogs may change in the future with the blending of feeds, social networks, blog networks, static content, user generated content and advertising we strongly feel the word BLOG will continue to be used as the “catch-all” to collectively describe the blogging process. We will just have to wait and see how it turns out next year.
