OPEN

Jupiter
Research advertising and marketing expert, Gary
Stein, has interesting article up on ClickZ talking about how blogs will
evolve (link is here).

In summary, he foresees the rise of networks of blogs that will take social media / consumer generated content more easily into mainstream news spaces, like Yahoo! News.

For example, Federated Media
Publishing (FM Publishing) is a new venture that’s bills itself as an
"Indie Label for Blogs." It offers a series of marketing and
technology services for high-quality blogs that help turn content streams into
real businesses. The organization is sort of loose. FM Publishing blogs aren’t
necessarily connected (so far as the consumer is concerned) to another…

He also calls Open Source Media
(OSM) "a more concrete" example of the kind of network that will rise up out of the blogosphere.  Interesting to note,  as OSM has been on the  receiving end of a great deal of scorn and sneering from  high profile bloggers like Jeff Jarvis (see here), who calls it noted that it has been called "Open Sores Media" by less charitable bloggers [update: OSM has taken Mr Jarvis’s (and others) advice and now reverted to its original name: Pajamas Media].

Steve Rubel doesn’t agree with Stein’s claim that blogs will “fold back into the core of the web", I guess meaning that they will never fully become regarded as coherent medium in and of themselves:

“I don’t
know about that one, Gary. I think there will be a static Web and a dynamic one and links between the two.
I don’t think that blogs will be assimilated into the core the way that RSS
will be.”

I’m not
sure what he means. It would be good to hear a  more detailed response to Stein’s  comments from the author of Micro Persuasion.

Stein continues:

Of course,
there’s a significant culture that’s grown around this particular technology,
but that culture is bound to remain a subculture.

Heretical as it sounds on a blog, that seems very credible to me. A big sub-culture. Perhaps a mass of sub-cultures, but a sub-culture nonetheless.

Or could blogging move all the way along the old adoption curve? I’m not so sure – I sometimes think it’s not for everyone.

Not everyone likes writing that much. Some don’t like reading either. For instance, I heard a podcaster on Eric Schwarzman’s report from Portable Media Expo say that it was only when audio became
an option that he got involved. Text-based services were just not of
interest.

But Stein also talks about on the demographic being mainly male and urban and remaining that way, and I’m not sure that that will always be the case. I just took a look at about twenty or thirty foodie blogs and there seemed to be as many women as men writing in that community.

His conclusion is that social media is on the rise but that "blogs" per se may not be a visible part of the media landscape – "You just won’t call it a blog."

I’m chewing Stein’s ideas over – but will definitely be watching these blog-groups closely to see how they evolve.