If I’d been smart or otherwise had some insight I would have gotten into blogging at least five years earlier. Instead, I start with an unfocused personal blog in mid 2007 and don’t really go whole hog into somewhat serious blogging until early 2008.

I’m a relative latecomer to the blogging game. Shrug. So be it.

However, these do seem to be interesting times, again in relative terms, to be a blogger. Some would say that blogging is moving into a stage of maturity and slower growth. Meanwhile, microblogging and lifestreaming are offering new options for online communication that rival blogging for reach while making it easier to use mobile phones, digital pagers and PDAs for Web publishing. Blog comments and related conversations seem to be going anywhere the commentator wants to take them.

Steven Hodson predicts that we’ll see the great blog weeding of 2008 as content creators migrate to other platforms or else give up the ghost altogether. The growing set of social media tools (don’t forget Facebook and MySpace) make publishing easier, which may be encouraging some casual bloggers to pull up stake and move on. Meanwhile, conversation dispersion, scrapers, and current advertising models have been throwing uncertainty into the results of monetization for some time. At least, that’s what I assume Steven’s getting at and that’s what I’m going with.

In some ways it seems like I’ve gotten into this blogging game too late, like a kind of pyramid scheme where the spoils go to the earliest adopters. In this case, the spoils are attention, reputation, and income.

On the other hand, if a lot of people are going to drop out of the blogging game, it could also be a great opportunity for many newer bloggers to establish ourselves as authoritative, respected bloggers. So maybe some of the spoils will go back in play.

But, if some people do pull out, could it be an indication that the wells of riches are drying up? It depends on what riches you’re looking for, I think. I’d say traditional monetization through ads certainly isn’t a piece of cake and it’s probably getting harder as the total pool of advertising capital, while still growing overall, is atomized and dispersed into many, many buckets of various sizes.

Attention and reputation are still in play but they may be limited to tightly defined niches. Or not, who knows? Smart people who communicate well and network effectively usually find ways to get their voices heard. These kinds of people are usually worth hearing.

At any rate, none of these things are dissuading me. I’ll keep on writing here until I either run out of ideas or an audience. Is there a better way to talk to the world?

One thing that I think is worth discussing is how to continue to increase the size of the blogging and social media audience. I think that’s something I think would benefit everyone. That’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.

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