The Twitterization of Blogs

According to Business Week, “most bloggers prefer mundane tidbits to deep thoughts, and backed by voice transcription and video sharing, the cell phone may soon be the tool of choice.

On average, there are only seven readers for each of the 12.5 million blogs on LiveJournal, one of the most popular services for hosting these online journals.

As part of this shift away from lengthy blog reflections that entail time behind a keyboard, cell phones are gaining traction as a key blogging tool. Popular services such as Microsoft’s Windows Live, Blogger, and Yahoo 360 began introducing mobile blogging features two years ago. These services allow users to post short notes and photos to their “moblogs” on the go, albeit from the discomfort of a cell-phone keypad.

But it wasn’t until more recently, with the overnight sensation known as Twitter, that the cell phone showed its potential to move to the fore of blogging. With Twitter, people share quick updates on their most mundane doings, often from a cell phone. If a growing number of bloggers are shying away from the citizen journalism and mass consumption that originally defined the medium, Twitter’s popularity shows how eager people are to share quotidian tidbits of life in real time.

With the connections between cell phones and wireless networks getting speedier, blogging companies also see potential for mobile video blogging. In the future …video and photos will become integral to blogging, says Andrew Anker, general manager of Six Apart’s consumer products division. After all, most of the time, bloggers may not have the time to write 1,000 words. But they can upload the visual equivalent via a camera-phone photo. “The writing-lots-of-words blogging will be a small amount of blogging,” says Anker. “When I’m in some place interesting and I have a quick thought or I see a funny sign and want to share it—when you think about blogging in the next five years, that will be blogging.”

Source
Business Week, June 4 2007