Tribal trends in professional Blogging

Chris pointed out in "Blogging is not a zero-sum game!" that greed and envy are entering the blogosphere. I'll pick up that point to write down what possible development I see in professional blogging to deal with these issues without loosing time in complaining about it. The good old times never ever came back, nowhere.

Darwin is a fact and an apple used Newton to change the world :-)

I think you can't stop the natural development that real life with all disadvantages is stepping into the 'cozy' blogosphere. You can't only have the advantages (money and fifteen minutes of fame). Good business plans and money worth assets are crucial for the future of professional blogging.

How to get beyond that point with a professional approach?
I see the good old tribal approach raising it's head - it's superior and has some good arguments coming along. A tribe is always more successful then the individual. Group together and take care of your assets. Build dependencies. Train the young ones. That's what all these buzzing sounds of 'ad networking and 'blog networking' are all about. It helped the Romans and it helped Attila the Hun. Build tribes!

Consequently I see a strong trend in the future towards the consolidation of professional blogs. Teams of people with professional skills will be created. I don't believe from the economical point of view that single author blogs are making more sense in the long run than teams. There will be a trend towards growing parallels with existing publishing houses. They are looking at a time line of experience of more than 200 years in dealing with these issues. Bloggers are publishing books at publishing houses and publishing houses are publishing in a blog style manner so both worlds are already overlapping.

The thing which comes with the team building is the delegation of tasks. You have to have some content, research, graphics and syndication 'departments'. Freelancers and foreign correspondents will add to this perfectly. Regarding revenue you will have to have an ad acquiring department. The splitting of editorial content and ad income is a must if blogs want to keep independent and free on the content side.

There will be blog agencies for content and ads ... delivering the same content to different blogs. Agencies like Reuters will jump on that content train. Actually they already do offer the news streams for big players like Yahoo. There will be small agencies who will be offering niche content. Existing affiliate and blog ads programs are just the start of it on the ad market.

Technically a group like cooperation might be reached through the bundling of content. Like that great 'recent posts' page here on performancing which has a lot to do with the publishing power of performancing.com. That's one reason why I am putting so much effort into writing here beside the 'cozy' feeling. My experience from the good old BBS days tells me that I am reaching more readers here then I would if I would just publish somewhere in the wild. Or as I am just configuring it with LifeType where you can use a summary page which shows the last posts of all participating blogs. But that technical approach will not be enough to keep the bad world outside and to shelter your content/tribe.

Talking about 'inspiration' ... well, you have definitely to fight for your copyright. If it's obviously a theft of your content you are looking at then you should ask a lawyer to protect your mental property - even if your content is meant to be free. That's your good right. Just complaining will not help. And it might be pretty OK to have a fee taking central instance where you can make property theft public and let people take care of that. This is the point where it starts to be useful to have a network with central services which are experienced in dealing with these issues. Take care to know what issn.org is offering and make appropriate use of it (one of my To-Dos). Just one example .... if you see Flickr as a kind of blog service too ... there was an issue lately with a copycat affair which was pretty bad. Somebody stole pictures from other users and claimed them on another page (or was it inside Flickr?) for himself. That's possible and it's happening. Nobody should be astonished.

My resume: For the next two years I see these tribal trends getting very strong. Parallel there will be trends towards specialization regarding the distribution of blog assets. Copyright issues and services to take care of that will come along that way.

Copyright © Markus Merz 2006 - All rights reserved

As always just my 2c ...

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, February, editorial, blogging, writing, publishing