When I first thought of doing this post it was with a different title and a slightly different focus but as I started doing some research on what I wanted to write about, something - or at least a possibility - began to occur to me that given the number of years which blogging has been around (10 years by some accounts) could we possibly be heading towards a next generation of blogging.

While the act of writing posts has constantly evolved the tools by which we publish and communicate with have remained pretty well the same. As blogging has moved into the realm of new media conglomerates (TechCrunch, GigaOM, Read/WriteWeb and Mashable to name a few) and more people are trying to earn a living as independent writers (such as myself I guess ) the platforms upon which we work are only now beginning to look outside their boundaries to include other ways to expand the conversation.

Moving from the Basics to the Brand

When I first started WinExtra I saw it as two parts that I really wanted to be interchangeable. There was the blog section which was my way of being able to comment on technology and interact with the conversation on a one on one basis. The second part was the forums; which were a replacement for the NNTP server I originally started from, which would allow for the creation - or continuation in my case, of a community. So in this case I already had the brand - WinExtra - I was just trying to fit existing tools around it.

For most bloggers though it was started out in a very basic fashion of setting themselves up a blog and having at it in whatever area that was of interest to them. As the popularity of blogging has increased the idea of it being a business has grown, with more than a few blogs joining the ranks of 6 figure businesses with CEO’s has increased as well. Suddenly terms like branding and social media became the buzzwords as we began to discover that we as individuals who write for a living; or at least try to, could be considered a brand.

As this happened we also realized that our message, our opinions and our knowledge wasn’t limited to just a single format. We could expand the blogging community experience by adding forums, we could spread our opinions using Twitter and we could move the brand into new territory by using Facebook groups. Blogging was growing up but as we grew into brands we found ourselves being limited to a segmented information flow because all the tools we used couldn’t intermingle - couldn’t successfully inter-communicate. We needed better tools in order to move our brands forward.

The Changing Toolset

As blogging and social media in general has grown it has become a part of a larger movement called social networking but to be a part of this often required constant maintenance of login information and updating of information. In my case I needed to manage the blog and the forums separately on top of maintaining my Twitter feed and any other of the social media that I was taking part in. My community - my brand - was being spread all over the place instead of being a cohesive way to promote myself.

But as we move forward more and more bloggers are seeing the need to bring their brand management together and be easier to manage. In effect what we needed to do was to create our own social networks around our brand which people could join if they wanted to and have a unified way to access all parts of the brand. The lines between blogs, forums and any other of the social media we use need to blur - blend together.

This is why we are seeing things like Moveable Type’s Community Solution, ExpressionEngine and other platform module makers trying to bring together blogging and forums. This is why companies like sezWho and Disqus are gaining users of their comment management tools. The lines are beginning to blur.

When I first started the blog and forums were two separate software packages that couldn’t talk to each other. Things like IM and chat were considered add-on hacks rather than an integral part of the package. Now though due to the popularity of social networking there is a real push to make everything talk to each other with the ultimate goal of making it easier for you to have a conversation with your community members across a wider spectrum of media.

As social networking grows we need to make sure that our brand takes advantage of any technology that makes the experience for the potential; and current community member as seamless as possible. So things like forum plugins for WordPress (or your preferred blogging platform) become more important. IM and chat plugins or widgets need to be refined and implemented. I know myself if I was doing it all over again I would be going a different route than separate software for my blog and forums especially when you have plugins like SimpleForums. As for the others I am still looking and experimenting.

The landscape of blogging is changing and so should the tools which we use to move our brand forward. Facebook or MySpace doesn’t have the lock on social networks especially if we have the tools to create our own and enable it to communicate with others. Whether it be by using universal sign-in protocols like OpenID or more closed options like MyBlogLog we need to make it easier for our individual communities to share information based on what the members what shared and how they what to share it.

Blogging the Road Forward

Blogging for a lot of us is no longer just slapping a post up on the web anymore. It has become our own social network with many different parts. Just as you need to have friends on somewhere like Facebook you should be able to have the same thing within forums that are an extension of the blog you visit. That in turn needs to be able to allow you to have the same connections on any other blog you read.

Blogging and bloggers of all types aren’t going anywhere except growing in number and combined with our readers probably have one of the potentially largest social networks if we could communicate with each other by more than comments and trackbacks.

This means we need to find ways for the very tools we have to communicate with to communicate with each other. Whether it be forums, chat, IM or any other social media they need to be able to inter-communicate and make your community members experience a seamless one regardless of which medium they are using or where they are with in your brand.

The lines are quickly blurring and the chance to build our own social networks that can communicate with other social networks via our community members is potentially a very powerful way to move our individual brands forward. It looks to be a very interesting time ahead for bloggers and social networks.

Listening to: Fatboy Slim - You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby - Acid 8000

Conversation Tags: blogs, blogging, social network