Bruce Sterling, the author of some incredible cyberpunk/ science fiction novels, doesn’t think there’ll be a lot of blogs around come another 10 years. At the recent SXSW (South by SouthWest) conference, he pointed out that just because there are many millions of blogs doesn’t mean any of them have to be any good. He’s quoted as saying
I don’t think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.
Truth be told, I was surprised, two years ago, when blogs started becoming a phenomenon (as far as I’m aware). Back in the early to mid-90s, while publishing a monthly print rag, my research found studies by the publishing industry that suggested that North American males, for example, simply didn’t care for reading as an activity. Females in Canada and the US were more likely to read books and magazines than males. The exception would be girly mags and sports mags, and possibly specific genres of novels.
Blogs changed all that, or so one would think. Are people, particularly males, actually reading more on the Internet than previous generations might have in print? Or are they just browsing blogs? If the latter, then maybe what Sterling says is true. I’ll be honest: I used to read a phenomenal amount of printed matter weekly. But the Internet seems to have ruined my ability to read lengthy documents online, and dissolved my interest in still reading printed matter. I can no longer read full books in any form – something I find deeply disturbing. And yet, I subscribe to over 1000 blogs and try to visit them at least once a month, if not daily. That’s because I have to, as part of my new career as a “pro” blogger.
So am I worried about Sterling’s prediction? Not at all. I’m a fan of his novels, but feel that if blogging goes on for another ten years (having already been around for close to ten years now), it will have “touched” a substantial demographic of the world by then and become a rather persistent facet of world culture.
Even if he’s right, there are other types of online content that tomorrow’s bloggers can shift focus to. Resource content will always be valuable on the Internet (which isn’t going away). Then there’s the next wave of the web, the Semantic Web, which will mark the effort to attach meaning and structure to content in a way that both humans and machines will benefit. Machines will be able to extract data for complex queries for specific information, such as finding all homes for sale in the US Midwest, less than $200,000 and within 5 miles of a public school.
Right now, this sort of information exists, but is hidden within the Invisible Web. I’m betting that blogs that adapt to the ideals of the Semantic Web will be those that remain in ten years.
Originally posted on March 15, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
Infamous Craiglist sex ad scammer and DMCA miscreant Michael Crook has been forced to apologize to camera as part 
Wired Magazine 
While much attention has been paid to Viacom’s high profile filing of a lawsuit against Google for “massive copyright infringement†little has been said about the grounds on which YouTube currently legally operates, and why the lawsuit is frivolous unless an amendment is made to the 1999 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Nomadishere has managed to perfectly verbalize the conditions any worker should ideally be able to control to work happily (but not necessarily most efficiently). Here are 4 of the 8 things.