As technologies change, communications change. For a while, blogs were considered the hottest new form of communication. What about blogs is innovative? Does blogging work? Are blogs really going to be the mode of communication for the next hundred years, or are blogs simply a flash in the pan?

To give you an idea of where blogs fit in the scope of communication, I’ve sketched out roughly how communication had developed over the years.

One to Few

--Before the printing press, communication was essentially one-to-one. Though books would circulate, there was a small literate audience, and books were not mass-produced.

One to Many

--The advent of the printing press made books a form of one-to-many communication: an author could reach an audience of thousands in one print run. This was considered the normal form of communication with other technologies, including tv, newspapers, radio, and film. One person (or a select group) would create a message, which would then be transmitted to a wide audience.

Many to Many

--New technologies encourage many-to-many communication. Blogging is a forum where anyone can author. Wikis encourage vast participation. This could be considered a democratization of knowledge production, because many people can now produce, but there is also a backlash because some people are worried about the validity of the sources that they read.

Blogs

--Some blogs are of interest to a large segment of the population. Other blogs, my CEO blog at http://www.jimestill.com, have a more specialized audience. But even smaller blogs are out there where people write only for their friends (these are not linked to, and many blog writers do not expect anyone else to read their blogs except for friends). Though the Globe and Mail says that blogs are being abandoned at a staggering rate, Perseus claims that the majority of blogs are written by teenage girls and update twice a month to keep in touch with friends and family. This is not to say that many blogs are not being abandoned regularly, this is often the case, but I just wanted to put things in perspective.

You must take it with a grain of salt that over a million blogs have been created, and after the initial post, there is no more updating. This can hardly be considered an abandoned blog, because it’s not even quite a blog in the first place. These blogs—one-entry wonders and teenage lifetools—are quite different than the blogs I read each day and the blogosphere that I interact with. It seems to me that if these are being abandoned, we have to assume that it is simply growing pains, and not a sign that blogs will no longer be viable communication tools in the future.

Blogs, it seems, have staying power as a mode of communication, as long as the writers have staying power as a mode of writing. Though individual blogs may come and go, blogs in general will continue to influence popular news sources.