What on earth would possess me to start writing a post on an untested, half-created blog that no one else knows about yet?

Answer: another great article by Alex Iskold, of course! It’s an article that fits well with this new blog, because it talks about The Evolution of Personal Publishing.

Alex writes about the various stages of personal publishing platforms on the Web, including:

  • personal websites (remember Geocities?)
  • journals (LiveJournal and clones)
  • blogs (like this one)
  • social networks and social media (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
  • microblogging (Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, etc.)

These five categories track the evolution of personal publishing, excluding article directories and?writing sites like Helium, Triond, and Associated Content. These five categories also seem to appeal to different types of people based on:

  • speed and ease of use
  • the power and flexibilty to create content

I’ve tried all five categories of personal publishing and I’ll use several of them on an ongoing basis. My preferred method to e-publish, however, is the standard blog, including this blog and the other two blogs that I write.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m growing very attached to my Twitter account - it’s great for short, quick bursts of information. Microblogging can probably do much more for me than I know about today (Caroline Middlebrook has written a great Twitter guide, by the way.) But I’m still not sold yet.

I’m currently fumbling my way through setting up a hosted Wordpress blog. Most of my blogging experience comes from using Wordpress.com or Blogger, so I’m learning a lot as I go. There’s more work involved than I thought, but fortuntely I have some technical knowledge, however limited, to help me through this. Wordpress has a lot of great guides, documentation, FAQs, and enthusiasts, so that makes things bearable!

I choose blogging over microblogging because I like the power it provides to publish, display, and index content, in addition to blogging’s relative ease of use. Well, there’s the monetization aspect, too, although I’m sure that will evolve for microblogging.

Microblogging’s strength is its greatest weakness: short bursts of data, while quick and easy to create, do not lend themselves to in-depth, meaningful communication. That’s a challenge that Twitter will face. I can see Twitter being an excellent companion to a blog, but otherwise it’s not terribly different from instant messaging or message boards/forums, despite the clean, simple interface. I haven’t investigated Tumblr in detail yet, so I’ll reserve judgement.

Back to Alex’s article: I want to jump to his conclusion for a moment:

The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs. (italics mine)

It will be interesting to see what will to happen to microbogging in 2008. Do you think it is going to take off? Do you have a Tumblr blog today? Are you likely to get one soon? Do you use Twitter?

I’ve already indicated that I do use microblogging. Alex suggests that microblogging might to bring blogging more into the mainstream.  I think that would be a great thing. Let me explain why.

Creators crave an audience. Bloggers have become a significant part of the content creation world. I believe that millions of people read blogs regularly, although I’m finding it hard to get an accurate feed on that stat. I’ve seen an estimate that over 200 million bloggers abandoned their blogs over the past few years, which the current group of active bloggers is predicted to reach 100 million in 2007. Presumably the number of people who read blogs is some multiple of 100 million, assuming that non-bloggers are a significant part of the blog reading audience.

As different forms of blogging become easier to use, they’ll attract more attention. If nothing else, microbloggers are probably more inclined to read regular blogs than people who don’t use personal publishing on the Web. Every little bit helps to grow the pot of readers. I think that increasing the potential number of blog readers is a good thing.

It’s a big and competitive blogosphere out there. It’s a fun and exciting place, despite some concerns that it’s maturing and will eventually decline. The rising of microblogging follows the classic pattern of product lifecycles. Someday blogging may be looked upon in the same light as personal Web pages from Geocities - quaint and fun, but limited. Maybe we need better and easier ways to match the power than blogs have today, although that’s a bit like comparing the abilities of Microsoft Word to a full-blown desktop publishing solution. Still, it would be nice to avoid some of the more technical parts of blogging (working with file directories, importing themes and plugins, and so on come to mind) yet provide the same power.

It would be foolish to ignore microblogging’s potential. However, regular blogs still have a lot of life in them, in my opinion. I think they represent the best intersection of personal publishing methods. Some of you have probably been journalling or blogging for over ten years. I’m just six months into it, so it might seem fresh to me, but I think that there’s lots of potential left to discover in this section of the Well of Awe. I’ve pitched my tent and I’m here to stay. I hope you’ll be sticking around as well.

Let’s talk.

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