The Widget Future of Blogs
Posted on October 25, 2006
Filed Under What's New |
The good blogs has a natural community of support - the dozens of bloggers who are in their blogging network referring visitors to each others’ sites. I am one of them and enthusiastically so.
What being in the network means to me is not really to do with traffic. I don’t believe my traffic has increased substantially so far but then again the network has been in private beta until yesterday. I hope that changes.
It’s teaching me important lessons. Like now I have access to an accurate stats package and isn’t that an eye opener :).
I’m also learning that the future of the blog is in the sidebar and all the different widgets that might end up there. My blog will become more functional and the sidebar will perform different tasks instead of being a dead zone. That might add up to additional income. I do hope so. The sidebar is vacant business real estate and people like TheGoodBlogs can fill it.
And I’m meeting some great Canadians! What else? Well now it’s public beta so we’ll see.
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7 Responses to “The Widget Future of Blogs”
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> I’m also learning that the future of the blog is in the sidebar and all the different widgets that might end up there.
I suspect this was written with tongue firmly in cheek but it’s late so I can’t tell for sure. OK - I’ll bite …
What sidebar ? - most readers will read your blog via a feed aggregator. Busy, cluttered sidebars are so 2002 :-p Seriously - sidebars are something blog owners care more about than blog readers do.
Helo Walter. What I meant, and I’d better get better at saying thigs precisely, is I doubt blogs will look like they do in a year or so. I get more readers on site than I do feed readers actually - could be becuase it’s a new blog. But on the site I imagine it will become more portal like with a variety of windows onto different worlds.
> I get more readers on site than I do feed readers actually - could be becuase it’s a new blog.
That’s interesting. I imagine over time though, the number of subscribers will grow bigger relative to the number of recurring visitors.
“I’m also learning that the future of the blog is in the sidebar and all the different widgets that might end up there. My blog will become more functional and the sidebar will perform different tasks instead of being a dead zone.”
I totally agree Hadyn and not because I’m an advisor to Grazr. Actually I’m an advisor to Grazr *because* I agree with this vision.
Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK made an important observation yesterday when he recognised the convergence between all our ’second lives’, ie. MySpace, MyBlog, MyStartPage, MySecondLife, etc. This is something I’ve been writing about for a while and a few weeks ago I summed it up with a post entitled - “I’m an Application”. To quote -
“MyBlog traditionally conceptualizes me as a book. It sees me as content. But the evolution of MySpace, MyStartPage, etc and the emergence of widgets points to a convergence of those platforms towards a conceptualization of me as an Application.
I’m a collection of inputs and outputs with some processing (not enough according to my critic!) in between. I’m not a book. People don’t read me, they interact with me. My digital-self should reflect that interactive nature.”
I go along with James and it porbably means what is out there as our representative has to be a lot more complex and engaging than a blog is now.
In fact when I think about that more I’d say another change would be to get blogs out of the stream, stream of conciousness and flow of events, and to give them a different value.
[...] Haydn Shaughnessy writes that the future of blogging is in the sidebar. He corrects himself in the comments, stating specifically that the blog will change quite a bit in the next year. That seems far more true. [...]