The Blog Herald brought a recent interview with Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz to our attention. In the interview, Schwartz said “Blogging as a term at some point will become achronistic.” If you are unfamiliar with the term achronistic, it loosely translates in this sense to mean blogging will become outdated. It doesn’t take a time machine to see that blogging will become outdated, similar to a trend that fizzles after it has become mass market. Blogging has reached the mass market saturation point, with blog readers maintaining their own blogs. So now what?
As discussed in our recent BlogTalkRadio Seminar on maintaining a loyal readership, one of the next steps in the blog evolutionary chain is utilizing your readership’s community potential. Social network sites like Twitter, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Facebook and MySpace make it easy to interact with readers in a neutral environment. Co-host Alison Gary of My Wardrobe Today and Wardrobe Oxygen attributes her success to the personal nature of her posts. By posting photos of her daily outfits, readers look to her for wardrobe, shopping and beauty advice. Another Coutorture Partner, Christine of Temptalia, makes it a point to reply to every comment received.
Perhaps it isn’t the concept of blogging that will become outdated, but the method in which blog authors communicate with their audience. As more and more websites vie for your readers’ attention, how do you plan to keep them coming back?
An education annex of the Coutorture.com Community 
The first thing I thought of when reading this article were zines. Remember the zine fad of the early ’90s? It was a fast and easy way to get your message out, whether it was about politics, music, art, poetry or just your life. I feel that zines were the precursor to today’s blogs.
The traditional blog may become passé, but as with the zines, another form of expression will take its place. A successful blogger will see the change of tides and roll with it. I think many of us have – our posts have become more information-packed, cutting edge, specialized. Our templates are more sophisticated, and we have grown from being the online journal to being a source of real information for the World Wide Web.
As for when blogs may go the way of the 8-track, I think we have quite a lot of time until that takes place….
The problem with blogging is that it did not evolve over the last few years–to add new features (ex: print option) and provide more (easy) control for the author and reader (point and click easy). So no, blogging will not die out. It just needs to move into blogging 2.0. with new behaviors!
Traffic on the other hand will come down to your niche and quality, it has nothing to do with how many other bloggs are out there. Remember there are more people making their way to the web as well, so the readership is also increasing.
As a side note: I think as the use of technology migrates from the desktop/laptop to the mobile-hand, (iPhone) the way we behave and communicate on the web will drastically change. This will have a great effect not only on blogging but everything else we do on the web. By 2010 we should see web 3.0 take place and hopefully blogging 2.0. as as one noted, we’re only scratching the surface of the world wide web.
Pingback: the sun herald