Blogging: I feel that 2008 is going to be an interesting year. Not just for me, for the blogging community in general. I get a feeling that blogging will go through a change as some of the social website take more prominence. The days of a WordPress or Drupal blog are not by any means dead. In fact the change will be good for blogging.
At present there are many bloggers who are not really bloggers. Their talents, their time and their resources are more suited to platforms such as FaceBook. The blogging community whilst possibly shrinking a little, will become more professional in appearance and content.
Page Rank: PR is slowly becoming irrelevant to many bloggers. It is interesting to note that while many bloggers have complained bitterly over their loss of PR (due to pay for posts), the reality is that life has gone on, There may be a few minor consequences in the loss of PR, but as I said – life has gone on. If you have lost PR this year – really – how has it affected you – have you lost money?
What I think may happen over the next 12/18 months is that a new form of ranking – targeted at blogs will surface. It will be interesting to see if Izea’s ranking system will be the one. Others that could move into this area include EntreCard and may be BlogRush in an attempt to save it. I think longer term Yahoo or MSN may see this as an opportunity to get a jump on Google.
Pay For Posts: I think this is one area that will really get a shake up – if not in the next 12 months then certainly over the next two years. Why? As RSS and email subscriptions take off the actual numbers of site visitors will drop. The value of banner advertising will drop – so too will the value of adsense and other click type advertising.
Where the real change will come is in the type of per per post advertisements. Blogging is one area that has not as yet been really attacked by the marketing community – and I am talking about the traditional marketing community. Once the marketing community gets its head around how blogging can be used, look out.
The cheap link farming type of pay per post will be replaced by the more traditional endorsement type posts. This is my rationale behind the need for an independent blog ranking system. The higher ranked blogs will be paid to post endorsements of products or services either self written or professionally written by marketing gurus – the professionally written posts would have just enough ‘space’ for the blogger to add their own words to avoid the ‘duplicate content’ trap.
Why? Visitor to these blogs would read the ‘endorsement’ and so too will subscribers to feeds. A perfect audience as they have ‘opted in’. In fact, if any marketing guru wants to trial it I don’t mind being the guinea pig 
Communities: I envisage more niche type communities with membership limited to those within a niche and by invitation only. These communities would work towards developing each others blogs, involve post linking, networking, guest posting and general promotion.
General: As much as I would like to see this as being the year of the small blogger, my experience so far tells me that small bloggers have problems becoming really involved in helping each other. There seems to be a whats in it for me attitude. The communities that do exist are generally within ‘social bookmark’ sites and a lot of those bloggers spend as much time, possibly more, making those sites better, prettier and often more functional than their own blog. Add to that the general ‘chatting’ that goes on they have little time or inclination to get involved in more serious aspects of blogging – but then – some of these bloggers are in it for the social aspect – I point you back to the top two paragraphs in this post.
Feel free to disagree with me, agree with me, or add your own views of the year ahead. I think it will be an interesting year. Do You?
