What’s next for (business) blogging?

Some changes in the marketing blogosphere may be a signal of things to come.

This view is necessarily colored by the sub-segment of the blogosphere I observe, i.e. blogs about business marketing, technology, knowledge management, content management and social entrepreneurship. It represent a particular view, focussing on content-rich, technology-oriented business blogs.

Amazing tools for marketers

Content management and knowledge management are important for business marketing. Some amazing tools are available such as diigo or drupal. Diigo is absolutely fantastic for annotated browsing and collaborative bookmarking, while drupal is a unique content management system.

Also Junta42 deserves mentioning, a vertical bookmarking tool for content marketers that makes the internet a better place for professionals in this sector. Google rolls out one relevant tool after another. The list could go on for a while, but for those among us willing to try new things, exciting times are most certainly ahead.

Content is king, and value/relevance to readers its queen

Last year, Jakob Nielsen published a widely read and discussed manifesto that bloggers should write articles, not posts. If we go today through Marketo’s list of 138 business blogs, one cannot help to observe, and should be grateful that most blogs limit themselves to one or few posts per week, but posts are becoming longer - typically about 2 pages long or about 3,000 to 7,000 characters.

So less frequency and more depth - a bit of reflection is not a bad thing for the marketing blogosphere.

From mantra’s to experimentation

The presumptions on how blogs should be written have calmed down, and we’re becoming more open to learn from each other on how to use a relatively new and complex medium.

Increasing interest from non-bloggers

The skepticism of non-bloggers is making way for interest to explore the medium. It remains a daunting task to launch and run a blog for a prolonged period of time - setup is easy enough, but it’s quite something else to define a blog project, and organising it for delivering regular quality content over time. IT illiteracy may also be an influencing factor.

Concluding

So good news overall. We’re getting much better tools and more interest, while we can continue to experiment and learn. But with increasing competition, we’ll have to work even harder to deserve and retain reader attention through relevant quality content.

Do you agree, or better, disagree? I’d love to hear from you on your views where (business) blogging is going.
See also
INTERACTIVE MARKETING BLOG: Blog, Blog & more Blogs; So where are we heading?