The Blogs and Bloggers Evolutions

There is a competition to elect the best Malaysian DotCom Youth.

Evaluation is based on the following criterias:
  • Revenue Generating
  • Innovative
  • Influences To Society
During those days, DotCom is referring to companies where they operate solely on a web front and nothing else, and I could still remember a few names such as the followings:
  • Asia Travel Mart
  • Lelong.com.my
  • Pararborong.com.my
  • Cari.com.my
Nowadays, DotComers are usually bloggers and many enterprises have opted to use a blog as the core web fronts rather than having conventional web sites.

I strongly believe and it is in my observations that when something becomes common, there will be no more money to be earned. For instance, pioneers bloggers used to be able to make a lot of money out of advertisements and other endorsements. As time grows, everybody can blog and thus the opportunities of making income out of blogging alone becomes harder. This issue has been explored under the long tail debates.

Not only that opportunities shrink due to intense competitions, also it is due to the psychology factors affecting customers whereby the perception that paying for a common thing would be totally unwise. This will be the period for DIY (Do-It-Yourself). Essentially, the explosive phenomenon of blogs is actually an indication of the decay of web development business, particularly those involving establishment of small medium enterprise web sites. The decision by Google to launch Google Apps confirmed this.

While there are still not many people are bloggers, due to the fact that some have no time to write while some are just not interested, I am very sure that blogs has brought many people to the web front easily.

Thus, a time will come when some really amateur bloggers will "retire" forever, due to the reason that there is an evolution trend coming.

Evolutions will bring about categorizations of blogs....
    1. Content Providers
    2. Aggregators
    3. Intelligence Miners
Each category of blogs will have typical strengths and values for existence.

Content Providers

Content providers have to be source for many other people and medias. They would consists of a few sub-categories.
  • Journalists - These people go out to the real scenes to grab breaking news.
  • Thinkers of a very specialized field - Why it has to be very specialized because if you are not specialized, you are not an expert and thus high chances are that the contents that you will produce are the results of the contents from others. Example of highly specialized field is Javascript programming (not just computer software programming but Javascript programming)
  • Authors and Writers - These people spend many hours pondering over the sky just to create something which you wouldn't be able to think off. And it is not very high chance that these people will publish their contents to blogs
  • People with many source of informants - Screenshots is one example.
  • Personal Blogs - Blogs which write on personal things.
In conclusion, blogs or bloggers falling under this category would need to invest a lot of time to look for the most original content.

Aggregators

Aggregators are web sites primarily aggregate blogs together. It is already a common thing. It includes technorati, netvibes, petaling street malaysia, planetmy and etc .

However, there are also blogs which aggregate information based on the personality factor. One of such example is LiewCF. Whatever LiewCF sees, smells, hears and thinks, he blogs about them. And it sells to a certain extend.

Another example is readwriteweb, which consists of a few bloggers and they attempt to cover many topics, mostly about web 2.0. Each of the bloggers is responsible for different aspect such as analysis, breaking news and etc.

The success of aggregators depends upon its platform and features available for content providers.

As for the case of LiewCF and readwriteweb, success depends on mass readerships as well as wide coverage of search engine reach.

Intelligence Miners

This category describes blogs and bloggers who do not produce original contents but is able to not only aggregate but also to make sense of as much information as possible which proves to provide values to readers.

For instance, when a blog about crude oil is presented, the miner must then be able to spider around its own blog and other information sources to create a snapshot of what is happening around the websphere with respect to this issue.

It must be able to keep readers in the loop and present readers with the best interest according to reading preferences.

The scope of intelligence mining is wide; aggregators' next step should be intelligence mining.

The success of intelligence miners, like aggregators, depends heavily on its platform and tools available.

The most relevant technology to describe ancestor of such availability is perhaps semantic web.

It-Sideways is currently a bit of content providers (with no area of specialization) and aspires to become an information miners.

It-Sideways is still an opportunist. And I call out to other opportunists to quickly embark on the right category in order to not becoming obsolete.

Comments