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Is Blogging Changing? Five Things you Should do in 2008 to Keep Pace.

Is Blogging Changing? Five Things you Should do in 2008 to Keep Pace.

Let me come clean with you, I don’t do many of these things. I don’t do them at my blog, but I have executed multimedia marketing programs, and they work. They work because multimedia helps a site stand out and it helps the reader, your customer, have a more complete experience with your content.

Different people respond to and interact with different stimuli — that’s why it’s a good idea to consider having visuals, words, audio, and video interspersed. Given the lower cost of entry, and that the average person now has more computing power than they will probably be able to exploit fully, it has become easier to be a multimedia production studio in house, on your blog.

The five things you should do to keep pace in 2008 are:

Videoblog. With the advent of services like Seesmic, Hictu, Ustream and VlogCentral where you can upload straight from webcams — and virtually all new computers equipped with cameras and editing tools like iMovie and FinalCut Profor Macs and Movie Maker for Windows, v/blogging is finally ready for the masses. How will you execute — like Twitter, but with pictures? Or a more structured approach?

Moblog. Say what you will about iPhone: its competitors are clearly scrambling to catch up, particularly with iPhone’s web interface. We’re not just talking about producing mobile-friendly content (though there are some great plugins for this) — now you can actually blog on the go with Utterz. It’s very promising: cellphone as blogging platform. See Mashable’s review.

Start a group blog. No need to do new writing — there are a new generation of aggregating plugins for things like WordPress which can help you start your very own LifeRemix. Find like-minded bloggers and build a new theme site, automatically reposting from your home site. Develop your own targeted portal — see for example the one Steve Woodruff developed for a group of us at Pageflakes; Conversation Agent is under the social media tab. This is particularly useful to niche and influence bloggers.

See Also
YouTube features for Content Creators

Diversify. Start a newsletter, the audience is very different from those who come to blogs, and you can recycle your evergreen material. In September, Lorelle wrote a series of posts here on converting from newsletter to blog. You could do the reverse. Use an ethical rich email provider. Or start a “new” blog by adding a new content section in a sub-domain. Why not add a digital photography section, or something else related, but capable of standing on its own?

The jury is still out on Twitter. Perhaps it’s a great tool. Perhaps it’s a time vacuum, destroying the chance that comments could be made on your site. Instead, people who talk to you there, may never come back to comment on your blog. They are already with you in their minds. But if you’re not exploring it, you should do so, and vow to put the Twitter down and step away from it, just like you did with your CrackBerry, every so often.

Blogging is changing, and for the better. It is adapting to the types of personalities of many diverse people and cultures. Try these five things out, that’s the best way to see if they work for you and your style.

View Comments (15)
  • those are some great bullet points, it’s definitely worth nothing the diversity one, niche blogs are great, but sometimes those niche’s can get stale

  • Sir Jorge — When the point of view is personal and different vs. a regurgitation of what everyone else is saying for that same niche, different ways of presenting the information enhance it further.

    Thank you for reading. Not all thrift shops may be created equal (from your blog post).

  • Don’t forget that email is and will remain the most important social networking modality. So one trend to watch is the continued use of SECURE mobile computing.

    Small businesses and large enterprises need to run their businesses securely, on the fly and across the globe. Mobile blogging can be done in safety. To name names, if that’s ok, we use 123Together for a Hosted Exchange Mobile Service (http://www.123together.com/mobility.xhtml) that provides our team with synchronized access to our group blog and knowledge network, Outlook, files and attachments.

  • Valeria, you are making very good points. Thanks for mentioning my company’s service Hictu, video blogging is going to be one of the next bif things for 2008.

  • Welcome to the conversation, Luca. And thank you for noticing the link. So I see we seem to be both made in Italy ;-) Good photography sequence on your header from Flickr. I have a lot to learn from you multimedia types.

  • Hear! Hear! Great post!

    Mobile in general is huge in technology, blogging, and productivity. Hence, I would add Utterz and Jott as number six. Both allow you to tap mobile for more productive blogging–and both allow you to blog more in the moment. Very cool tools.

    I know a new mobile video service called Qik just launched too that Robert Scoble and others have experimented with–but I’m not a fan of much of 90% the video or pictures i’ve seen from mobile devices.

  • Hi Nathan,

    Good of you to add your voice to the conversation. I did have Utterz in mobile blogging up there, along with Mashable’s review of the tool ;-) Thank you for the tips on additional tools though. It seems like every day there’s a new one!

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