Blogging has been pretty mainstream for over five years now, but ever since Technorati released their recent State of the Blogosphere address, there has been a strong buzz around the blogosphere and the impending death of blogging.   This is primarily because of figures showing that about 200 million blogs have been created, but only 7.4 million have published a post in the past 4 months.   As this site loosely focuses on blogging, I wanted to share my thoughts and hear what some of your opinions are.

In my personal opinion, I don’t think that blogging is dying at all.  My belief is that to many people start a blog for the wrong reasons, or misunderstand the work and commitment associated with blogging.   I would say there are currently two primary reasons why most people start blogging:

1. Get Rich Quick - I’m not sure why this idea is out there, but there are a ton of people that believe that blogging will make your rich quick.   There are of course a number of people that have made a lot of money blogging, but most people who starting blogging now will need time to develop their blogging skills and develop readership before there are any monetary possibilities.
2. Personal Blog - This is closer in line with the original intention of blogging.   People launch a personal blog where they can talk about whatever they want.   Here are family pictures, these are my political opinions, and my favorite sports team won last night!   These types of blogs don’t have any focus that would appeal to a large group of people, so they lack readership, which in turn discourages the blogger from putting time into their hobby.

I also think the emergence of microblogging has had a strong influence on people leaving their blogs dormant.   Things like tumblelogs, Twitter and Facebook status updates have become very popular, negating what blogging offered to some people.   It’s much quicker and serves the same purpose for them.

What is the Future of Blogging?

This is always tough to gauge, so you kind of need to look at trends.

1. More User Interaction - The appeal of blogging has always been the interaction that is possible with the author and other readers, making the site a conversation station.   As bloggers continue to narrow their focus on smaller niches, the interaction seems to get better.  If you look at what WordPress is doing with their acquisitions, you can see how user interaction (improved comments, polls, BBPress, etc.) seems to be their focus for the future of their platform.
2. Rise in Video Blogging - What this method lacks with SEO (search engines can’t index what is said in a video), it makes up for in personalization.   Video posts can be created very quickly with mini-rants and I think readers enjoy video blog posts because they can actually see the author and hear the emotion in their voices.  These types of sites can develop a strong following very quickly and don’t rely much on search engines to bring them traffic.    Video blogging can also be integrated into a standard blog, giving people the best of both worlds.

I also believe we will continue to see fewer blogs in the traditional sense, meaning a standard website where the homepage displays a loop of the most recent posts.  More than likely some sort of hybrid will emerge over the next couple years, which is a cross between a Content Management System (CMS) and a blog.

What do you think?  What is the future of blogging?

If you take a step back and look at the successful premium WordPress themes available today, the first thing you’ll notice is that they offer much more than the standard blogging template that most free WordPress themes offer.  You’ll find magazine themes, news themes, video themes, social networking themes, and all sorts of other themes that are designed to function as content management systems.  

In looking at the future of WordPress, my hope is that the standard build of WordPress will continue to grow and many WordPress plugins will fill the gaps to make a fully functional content management system. 

Recently BloggingPro did a great job of showing the versatility of WordPress with their post showing 7 different ways to use WordPress.  In their post, they highlight these 7 ways you can use WordPress:

1. Blogging
2. Photoblog
3. Tumblelog
4. Magazine
5. Online Shop
6. Contact Manager and Customer Relations Management
7. Twitter Platform

Click over to see the examples of each!  

I personally use WordPress for most of my content sites, including several static sites, a tumblelog, and of course several blogs.   Its versatility is amazing.   In what unique ways have you used WordPress?