Blogging and careers
Microsofter (Microsoftie? that doesn't sound right) Don Dodge, inspired by a Boston Globe article, talks (on his blog, of course) about whether blogs can be good for your career. My sense is that, MySpace panic aside (a phenomenon that danah boyd comments on), the conventional wisdom regarding blogging and work may be shifting decisively away from the "blogging will get you fired" narrative line, to a new "blogging is essential to getting hired" one. (We already went through a "some crazy companies have blogs!" and "businesses have to blog" phase, and some executives have been doing it for a while.)
It strikes me that the CW is shifting just in time for blogs to morph into something else. There are, I think, two big things going on.
The first is a growing sophistication regarding the remixing of content. Corante's hubs are a good example of this: they mix feed from a whole bunch of blogs, layer some editorial content on top of it, and create something new. On the user side, RSS readers give readers a greater degree of control over how they approach their own universe of blogs, and what material they see (e.g., posts yes; comments no; that weird design, definitely not). As time goes on, those readers will doubtless get more powerful and smarter, and start to do smart things with folksonomies, natural language searching, and the like.
Second, there are self-conscious experiments with the medium of blogs, that challenge conventions about what blogs are. For example, we're starting to see blogs that are designed to be temporary. Amazon's new experiment in author blogs seems to assume that authors will talk about their books during the hype phase, but stop posting when the PR campaign is over; and of course there's the case of the Financial Times article on blogging that spun off a short-lived blog.
Further, the amount of automated content on blogs, displaying everything from where you are to what music you've been listening to to what you've bookmarked on del.icio.us, is rising: the more hot-wired ones are little Times Squares of automatically-generated, self-promotional, real-time author metadata. Eventually, the time may come when some people won't have to write anything: they'll just be, and information about themselves will show up on their blogs. (Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker even imagine a world in which things will blog.)
So yes, blogging as we understand it now may have virtues for the career-minded; but the nature of blogging is likely to change in the next few years.
Comments