Beyond Blogs

This post has been brewing inside my head for about one or two weeks, and i thought, i might as well whack the initial thoughts out while they're still fresh, so here goes:

Beyond blogs, there's more to it right? i mean, afterall, it's only been the last two to three years that communications and marketing people are starting to take blogging more seriously. Already in Singapore, we see more and more bloggers being invited for press events, blog advertising is becoming more sophisticated, going beyond banner ads into more community centric events, or at the very least advertorials.

but make no mistake, we have not arrived, all this is just birth pangs and teething problems. blogging will continue to evolve, or the blogger will. and along with it, communication, marketing and advertising practices.

yongfook talks about the evolution of blogs into lifestreams. We interact with the internet so much, that lifestreams will basically aggregate our online experiences, a somewhat centralised point where people can be kept up to date about our activity on the net. kinda like leaving virtual breadcrumbs. all picked up by RSS readers of course.

friendfeed and sweetcron are the possible first manifestations of this future. you can check my friendfeed on my sidebar. everything also gets aggregated to my tumblog

So what do i mean by "Beyond Blogs"? Well, as the communications industry and corporate entities start paying more attention to bloggers, recognising us as part of the communications ecosystem, inviting us in their conversations, activities, press conferences, product reviews.. etc. we're already seeing how blogs and bloggers are evolving.

this is where some of my fear and paranoia lie, especially as a communications practitioner. what sort of blogging culture are we breeding with our media activity? do we see the blog as a tool? or the blogger as the tool?

there's a stark difference in this. i value the blogger. i think the blogger and their ideas, conversations are what i'm interested in when we conduct media activity. the blog in that sense, should be the least of your concerns. there are so many ways BESIDES the blog to share information and have conversation, and yes.. these conversations are increasingly happening online.

and with communications practitioners constantly reaching out to bloggers, what culture are we perpetuating? i won't go into much specifics, but i hope it won't become a festering pool of product placement, fake shakey-cams passing off as "reality", or ungenuine reviews and reporting. what's the point in all that?

communication that matters, is when it's genuine, transparent and meaningful. but i think that's too much of an ideal, there will always be some corporate matters that stay corporate matters. Maybe if we all thought carefully of what our businesses are about, we would know how to communicate it to the media, to the people.

by starting on the this train of thought, the concept that goes "beyond blogs", is to perhaps envision a future where media and public life are asynchronus. where press events can become public events, afterall.. everyone has a media capture device these days. and we'll get our share of professional media, and personal media.

it's earstwhile to highlight this post by Chris Anderson, who champions the passionate amateur, as opposed to the bored journalist. LINK

he's a bit biased, but i agree with him. but i believe thie bored journalist happens when they've lost their lustre to write. we still have great journalism today, and some very memorable ones in the past. and good journalist deliver a value that sometimes even the most passionate amateur may not be able to deliver. perhaps a skill, a flair, a trained insight, the kind of thing that only professionalism can give you.

but i'm not discounting passionate amateurs, who go out of their way to find the information that makes the most sense to micro-audiences, and sometimes, very wide audiences... increasingly, this line is getting blurred.

different motivations for very different writers. in that sense, whether paying a blogger is something we want to discuss, i say that as more journalists find themselves blogging, and as more bloggers find themselves being credible, responsible and professional, there's a middleground where both meet to be writers/bloggers/content producers that get paid.

in the future, we HAVE to see more content producers, as audiences get increasingly fragmented, post modern, searching for different facets of the truth, that there will be a breed of digital natives that are credited, and regarded to present that truth, or at least a facet of it.

will it go beyond eyeballs and readership, subscription numbers? i don't know per se.. but i'm very interested in any conversation around that.

but the media network of the future will be far more interesting, more brazen, more truth seekers.. but it'll also be harder to tell the truth from lie, from signal vs. noise.. it could go either way. i don't know if i dare predict utopia.. i envision more happening, but whether or not it ends up as a good thing, depends on how we wield our tools now.

today.