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Blogs > professional blogs in top 10 Internet trends for 2004

January 17, 2004

The Webtalk guys, a radio show syndicated from here in Seattle, has come out with their “Top Internet Trends for 2004.” Number five is professional blogs.

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 The blog hype in 2003 will settle into a smaller group of bloggers as many personal blogs will go out of date for increasingly longer periods of time as many lose interest in keeping them up to date.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.

Really simple syndication, better known as RSS, took the Internet by storm in 2003 as many bloggers began using this XML-based standard to share and syndicate written content to RSS News Reader applications. RSS is not really a new Internet protocol as it uses the web to syndicate and share content and links. Look to 2004 to be the year of RSS as we see it compete directly and improve on the World Wide Web and be a part of the decline in use of the web browser.

They make a key point about blogs following the rise and fall of ‘web pages’ of a few years ago. Remember when everyone asked if you had a ‘home page.’ These simple Web sites, usually a few pages in length, were filled with little of interest and faded in use as people saw no value to them. (Heck, there are still a lot of lawyer’s sites like that) But Web sites and the Internet have done anything but fade. As people learned how to create value, communicate with others and conduct business via Web sites and the Internet, our use of the net has gone through the roof. I think you’ll see the same with blogs.

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