How Blogging 2.0 Is Changing the Quality Conversation

Social Shifts and What to Expect

If you’re not jumping on board the Web 2.0 revolution, you likely will begin the upcoming months.  As more businesses and websites are making note of and embracing 2.0-driven technology, the quality and styles of blogs in particular are taking on new dimensions. When blogging first began to pick up speed, we saw the full range of personal, political, marketing-driven, and social networking sites chock full of opinions.

It was a pivotal time in Internet history where people could interact in a contextual framework of the blogging software of choice. For example, Google fans would likely pick Blogger; others may have chosen Wordpress, LiveJournal, or Typepad as their publishing platform. The key area that blogging software and tool sites didn’t address was the ability to interact and create networks simultaneously. This is what successful social networking and business blogging sites are catering to now, but the initial blogs that were becoming popular in the Web 1.0 era were usually spin-offs of basic websites. They served as a virtual ‘journal’ of people’s thoughts, random opinions, or small bytes of intelligent essays.

Today, Blogging 2.0 is developing under a new paradigm. We’re seeing deeply embedded links, hyperlinks, videos, and even mashups of open-source software as bloggers become smarter, more efficient, and more web-savvy. This increase in participation can be attributed to how well a blogger promotes and links to other blogs; it’s the networking model on a small-scale, and stronger writers tend to partner up with larger site such as Technorati, Digg.com, and others for mass appeal. When a site can include a user-generated rating system, or some format of a visual ‘result’ of content on a real-time basis, the appeal is enhanced even further.