A Look Into The Crystal Bowl
Elizabeth Albrycht thinks "...we need to pay more attention to the transformations these tools enable than the tools themselves" and she is looking forward to the day when there are no more big business press articles and so on about blogging.
I couldn't agree more. Maybe that sounds strange considering that this most of the time is a meta blog - a blog about blogs - but it is all a question of perspective. Today we need those press articles. Many professional communicators need people around who can tell them what a blog is. Today. But that will change.
I have no idea what will happen then, but here is a few guesses (it's Friday after lunch, I'm entitled to give you a not so theoretically well-founded post...)
Blogs and wikis as such will not be discussed. No one will "have a blog". Some of us will look at, say, a part of an intranet and recognize the way people write and discuss there, saying "hey, that's a blog", but that won't be important. It will just be the way they communicate in that workplace.
The communicative essence of blogging will have spread to all channels - more or less. If the personal and informal tone works in a blog, why should it be limited to that?
Very few will buy or use separate blog CM-systems (sorry MT, sorry Blogger). The tools will be built into the systems organizations use anyway. I think this is happening already.
The blog consultancy business that we see emerging will have a year or two of relative success, but then fade away. Maybe web consultants in general will incorporate their knowledge, but more probable participatory communication will be a skill of all communication firms (pr/ir bureaus, ad agencies, event organizers etc etc). Not to mention the Marketing and HR departments of large corporations.
The question is when this will happen? What do you think? 2-5 years?
