It is quite clear that there are about to be fundamental changes in what blogs will look like. Or, perhaps a better phrase, what part blogs will play in people’s future digital identity.
Blog ReadWriteRead summed up the changes recently in a posting The Future of Blogging Revealed. To summise, the blog argued that blogs would become less of a steam of thoughts and more location for a person’s digital identity presented as a narrative or “Lifestream” – the place where all your digital activity, whether on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or any other, is brought together in one list.
An example fo this might be friendfeed but better presented, as in Sweetcron due to be launched soon. These are blogs that feed horizontally across the screen and leave the life of a blogger as if like a narrative read left to right
The examples given by ReadWrite Web were a fellow WordPress blogger Kieran Delaney with his Lifestream page on a regular page of his blog. And even more radical, blogs that are just a Lifestream such as Alan Cheslow. And my own discovery in the debate, the Uk blog of Martin Stabe who takes Cheslow’s idea one step further.
His blog is only a list of his recommendations to other articles through his choices on delicious. So, just as a traditional blog is a set of ideas but written by oneself, this is a set of ideas but just from other people (NB Stabe also has a regular and traditional blog with UK B2B magazine for journalists Press Gazette).
What does this all mean? That blogs themselves willl die out? That we will all rely on others’ opinions for our blogs? Not at all. A blog will still remain a key part of people’s intellectual activity and a vehicle for networking but it might be entered through the diverse online activities of a Lifestream. A blog would then just be one of many digital activities but a most important part,
Oooh, I really like this idea. It is only in the last few weeks that I have consciously gone through all my digital identities – Flickr,Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, delicious – and cleaned them up. In pulling them together, it has really helped push my own name and that of this blog up Google, it has really it has really brought all my online activities together into a formidable digital identity. Or, digital footprint.
This is what it comes to. A digital footprint that clearly marks out the measure of your thoughts, the interaction of your activities and, dare I say, become the prime repository of your memory. Not to get to sci-fi on the reader, but could this be the start of a life outside our bodies? Could this be the beginning of our memory – our visual, intellectual, aural and oral memories – stored online ready to be fed back into our minds at some moment in the future when we need it most?
Enough of such thoughts. It is sufficient that the blog is about to change visually, functionally and, most interestingly, become just one part of that digital identity.
Want to find out what the editors of the future will be like, click here.
John Welsh's Blog 
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Hmm. I think a blog has always just been a part of our Digital Identity. Just as our Del.icio.us posts have been, and our email (though that is more private, generally).