Kevin Maney, who has covered technology for 20 years at USA Today, writes that the blog bubble will pop but that the trend of consumers creating content is here to stay - even if it is overhyped right now. Kevin sez...
So, yeah, blogs are cool. Anything that gives people a voice benefits society and makes us all better and smarter - and, as bloggers have proved, makes established information outlets more accountable. But blogs don't seem to be the second coming of the printing press. They're just another turn of the wheel in communications technology.
More likely, a few years from now, after the blog bubble has normalized, we'll look back and say that this technology made a difference and that our total fascination with it seems quaint.
I agree. Consumer generated media will become part of the fabric of the entire media landscape. The one quibble I have with Kevin's article is where Larry Downes, professor of information economics at the University of California-Berkeley, says that reading blogs will go the way of serendipitously surfing the Web. This is where RSS comes in.
As the technology gets easier (keep an eye Microsoft) people will be able to read more content than they did before. This will lead to an increase in blog readership, but it won't be equally divided among all bloggers.
