My blog is new and kind of obscure, or at least not mainstream. Like most bloggers I desire to be read by others and therefore met the technical requirements to achieve visibility. However, for some outlandish reason I do not feel compelled to use Big Names from the Blogosphere to boost my image. Yes, I use many links in my posts as credentials and for my own credibility; nonetheless, I do not expect a high visitor return from it. I believe interaction can yield better results and that is also what I intend to do.

Louis Gray covers the matter of blog-linking in one of his recent posts. Though an interesting post, I enjoyed reading the comments even more (some from famous bloggers in the tech environment). The Internet has evolved a lot since broadband. We saw blogs and social networks arriving, then micro-blogs, video blogs and now mobile social medias. We arrived to a shifting point where blogs became commodities forcing readers to select their sources and authors to merge or get into niches. Scobleizer is one very good example. The upcoming of 3D, decentralized virtual worlds, social and semantic search and most importantly mobile internet will force bloggers to adapt. Common blogs like this one will become obsolete in a few years time and will be handled in different ways using new technologies.

Blogs have in a certain way taken over the role of newspaper or certain aspects of it. Though they are virtual, blogs have almost the same limitations. The strength of quality papers and magazines is that they are shared. When someone buys a magazine, two to five extra people read from it. That’s how printed advertising campaigns are organized, using these statistics.

In a sense, links in blogs bring a virtualized and potentially viral support to this behavior. However, as people have only a limited amount of time, they also have to optimize their sources. With time, and with the help of aggregators, people started using filters and select based on relevance. Also many blogs (and posts) are scanned instead of fully read – the same way it is done with paper magazines. This is one of the reasons why micro-blogging is becoming quite successful, even if only with a certain category of bloggers.

Scoble also recently said that blog comments are dead and still, we find many comments on different blogs; even though I must admit, many are just trash. I suppose that the quality of the comment depends on the quality of the post and the type of readership a particular blogger has. Anyway, does a blog have a “raison d’être” without readers and to some extend interaction with them?

This tells a lot on my petty blog…

When electricity, gas and water became commodities (at least in a part of the world) they integrated into our daily habits. Taking long showers and keeping the television lit for hours was normal. Today however, with soaring prices, we start changing those same habits – adapting to the new environment. With all the social medias we have access to, we also have the need to adapt, but in this case it takes more time and understanding – information is indeed volatile. If blog links seem to be declining it is because they also have become part of a wholly commoditized structure. They might wane, but will almost instantaneously be replaced by other linking means, which might be less relevant or just seem less relevant. Say welcome to Google Lively, Vivaty and the others.

Yes it is a matter of time before blogs will falter and be stored in archives. They will however reappear fortified out of this experience and found in a new and more evolutive appearance!

I just hope someone will think about creating an online archive or library for all the actual blogs. It would be a shame for humanity to lose this cultural aspect of our society and for some cases important ideas and thoughts…