Collis Ta’eed of North X East wrote an interesting post about as he put it “Thinking Outside the Blog“. I couldn’t agree more that blogs are changing, and that blogs need to set themselves apart from the rest. After all, if blogs didn’t set themselves apart, they’d all be the same, right? That aside, I think that blogs need to start looking less like blogs.
Currently, there is an overabundance of people who, as I put it in another post, think that the word blog refers to an online journal. We need to dispel that idea, forcing people to acknowledge that blogs are just another form of publishing. Unconventional design helps. After all, people can’t say “Erg! A Blog!” if the site in question doesn’t look like a blog.
Back to Collis’s post, I like the idea of blogs becoming “increasingly more sophisticated”. WordPress, especially, is leading the way in that, with their vast amount of plugins.
“Most mainstreamers are only just starting to get blogs. For many, blogs and RSS feeds are still things they are only vaguely aware of. The current audience pool while vast is still limited.” How unfortunate, and unfortunately true. RSS is an amazing technology that makes the web a lot easier to keep track of. Then you have blogs, the ultimate publishing model.
Great job, Collis.
