Predictions for Blogging in 2008
Writers on blogs including Blogging Tips, Daily Blog Tips, and Read Write Web have expressed their views on what to expect in the upcoming year in terms of blogging and web development, in general.
2007 can be looked at as one of the biggest years to date for bloggers. Incomes soared, blogs became more professional sources of incomes - due to the availability of more ‘premium’ blog themes. Web behemoths (Google, Microsoft and others) began dumping tons of funding into purchasing other blogging companies and developing their own products (Microsoft Live Writer), to help enhance the experience while blogging while making it more mainstream.
Blogging is extremely popular now but in 2008 it’ll be likely that businesses use blogs on a more widespread basis. Larger blogs will continue to grow, but smaller ones will still have great opportunities to make a profit. Bloggers may shift their income sources - as we saw in the past year, there have been fewer AdSense/textual ads used on mainstream blogs and a higher use of graphic ads - 125 x 125, leaderboards and banners (728 × 90 / 468 × 60). Creativity was a leading factor in revenue growth - self-created ads were common across the web. Paid reviews and services will reach new levels - widely know blogs offering blog consulting such as ProBlogger and related experiments will create alternative income sources.
A Look At Trends
In 2008, Blogger and WordPress will continue to dominate, and Movable Type, Drupal, TypePad, will need to be adopted from larger blogs and better support (plugins, themes) before we see any major shift.
Blogging isn’t dead and there won’t be much slowing down in 2008 - the popular subjects including blogs about blogging, tech, life/writing blogs - won’t stop growing but there will likely be a slow down in the number of new blogs created in these areas.
While 2007 was the year of social media, blogging is still growing at an exponential rate.
In conclusion, the media and everyday people will embrace blogs as a new media and thousands of great opportunities are sure to come your way - take them and make 2008 a prosperous year.
