Blogging to be more "professional" in 2004

I think everyone agrees that the blogging phenomenon will continue in 2004. The main disagreements come from where blogging will change as the year unfolds.

The WebTalkGuys see blogs getting more professional this year. That is, the growth of personal blogs will slow but the journalistic and corporate blogs will increase.

"Weblogs in 2004 will go through a transition as the explosive growth in the number of bloggers will slow, but the quality of the active blogs will become much better. The blog technology and uses will expand in 2004 to include more professional journalists, online experts, major media and corporations. The blog hype in 2003 will settle into a smaller group of bloggers as many personal blogs will go out of date for increasingly longer periods of time as many lose interest in keeping them up to date. This is the way personal webpages declined a few years ago."

Yes, exactly. Remember personal Web pages? This was the big thing a few years ago as service providers gave users free space and design tools to create free Web pages. Everyone thought it was great and the number of personal pages exploded. The trouble was, what do you do with a "personal" Web page? They just became clutter as people realized that they had no real use. Besides, they were hard to change or update. Of course, the advent of blogging with easy creation and update pretty much sealed the personal Web page's doom.