In response to my half-formed and dubious thoughts about the next iteration of the blogosphere, Johan points out the need for, and benefits of, better integration across different communication systems & not just in the world o' blogs. Ecmanaut:

My guess on what lies ahead is we will be seeing increasing cross-pollination between communications systems of diverse natures, bringing IM clients and protocols like Jabber closer to email, news, blog comment posts and the slow but steady flow of blog entries, making a more natural and tangible connection between the different paces, persistence and connectedness. While different media with different rules, limitations and possibilities, they all have human and our needs as a common denominator, and I can't see why they have to remain as often rigidly separated as they are today.

Agreed!! Much of what's been happening recently with feeds / tags seems to be about taking information and encoding it so that it is functional / useful / informative no matter what container it is accessed through. In part this is what I was stumbling towards with yesterday's post about the Feedosphere. How will we rate information for reliability and influence when it is recovered, accessed and used across many platforms and in many formats simultaneously. The formerly focal "hit count" will be at best a peripheral statistic.... I'll be interested to see what takes its place.

Filed in: blogtech, feeds, readers, tags, folksonomy