It’s that time of year, when prognosticators and pundits dust off the crystal ball to predict the trends for the New Year. In the case of the business of blogging, several interesting trends are in sight for 2010. In no particular order, we start with the banishment of ‘blog.’
Remember when we’d go to the record store to buy music and the book store to find our reading material? The same can be said for ‘blog.’ It started as short-hand for a Web Log, then transmuted into both a noun and a verb umbrella indicating short online writing. However, as more and more people turn online for news and information, those blogs quickly became more than the inane rambling of someone inordinately occupied with lint, to disseminating facts. Couple that with the decline of newspapers and you need a better term to describe the wide range of online material. For that reason, I suggest the following: site. This connects with a similar prediction from our friends at the Inquisitr: five major blogs will be in the top news sites for 2010.
Our second prediction doesn’t require us to climb out onto a shaky tree limb. Instead, building on the first, we see a consolidation between traditional blogging and larger social-media players. We’ve already seen the quick adoption by Automattic of Twitter’s new API, allowing people to update their blogs from 140-character “tweets.” We also saw Google include those Tweets in its search results. The third leg to the stool will be Facebook, leveraging its more than 3 million users to create a more socialize blogging atmosphere.
Lastly, we’re likely to see more sell-offs and acquisitions in the blogging space as the end result of a bruising 2008 and 2009. Yahoo plans to close My Blog Log this month. Yahoo had the bad luck of buying My Blog Log in 2007, about the same time people were rushing to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. We also saw Jeremy Wright, give up the b5Media CEO slot to Elaine Kunda. Although Wright gave the usual ‘family’ reasons, the Canadian blogging network head saying he was burned out and unhappy. In 2009, b5Media announced a controversial pay change for bloggers. Just prior to Wright’s departure, b5Media’s sales VP reportedly left the company.
The introduction of Kunda also carried its own implications. The Toronto residence was responsible for cost-cutting and preparing companies for a merger. In 2006, b5Media received a reported $2 million in 2008, following its first round of funding around 2006. Investors often wait three to four years, then push for a cash-out or merger.
[Via Inquisitr]
