There was an interesting conversation on the radio last week about blogging. Sheilagh Rogers was interviewing three people with different relationships to blogs. One of them, Caterina Fake described the interview on her blog. She was on the program with (in words taken from her blog)
Tod Maffin, broadcaster and futurologist and Jim Elves, who created a site called Blogs Canada. We talked about Tod's moblogging, and Jim's site, which is an attempt to organize the blogosphere for Canada. I said that in the beginning there was a lot of backlash against blogging because people thought the internet was getting "polluted" by all these people writing about what they had for breakfast, but I pointed out that the intended audience for those blogs was probably just that person's friends and family. I also said that one of the things that we had discussed at the CAJ conference on Friday was the difference between bloggers as "citizen reporters" and journalists. Journalists actually have some accountability, the reputation of the paper to uphold, and a phalanx of fact checkers employed by their paper. Bloggers, Jim said, are more like "Letters to the Editor" or the Op-Ed page fo the newspaper. And I think the future of weblogging is what you see over on the right hand side there: photoblogging. And photoblogging just for your friends and family.
I don’t agree with her. I do enjoy the photographs from different lives, but I also want to read what people feel about their lives. The directory of Canadian blogs is organized by region and category, with over 8,000 blog-sites listed. I haven’t had enough time to research it but am looking forward to looking into it.
So—the blog is here to stay—until it mutates into something else.