Andy Warhol might have seen it all coming when he uttered the phrase, "Someday, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." What we now know, fame or not, our ability to express ourselves to the outside world is a 24/7 possibility. We have the blog.
The rapid rise of the Blogosphere has caught virtually everyone by surprise. Bloggers have already proven the keyboard is mightier than not only the sword, but also an entire office full of keyboards. Just ask Dan Rather and CBS. 
What we are witnessing is no less than an entire revolution in the world of free expression, not seen since 1436 when Gutenberg invented the printing press. For the first time in history, one person could transmit a single idea to the masses. Now the masses can transmit their ideas to the masses. With over 4 million of your neighbors and friends now blogging, the revolution has begun. So what is the future of blogs? Will they become more than mere online journals with bad spelling and mangled grammar?
For a clue, think television. The first direction a new form of media usually delivers is a repackaging of all that came before it. The first round of television programming was essentially taken from radio: quiz shows, serial dramas, and news. The Internet is in a similar stage of development, repackaging television programming and print news, streaming numerous radio stations and movie trailers, and now blogging.
As the competition in the marketplace of ideas becomes more intense, blogs must evolve. They must become sexier, using media-rich content such as video, photos, and audio. Some blogs will resemble magazines; others, 24-hour cable news . Serious bloggers will want all the tools the networks have, such as satellite feeds, and they will become a filter of news for the rest of us who do not have the time to sift through mountains of information. Text-only sites will be viewed as dinosaurs as the MTV generation matures into middle age. And as media and audiences become more sophisticated, quality of content must keep pace.
Everyone will have the ability to broadcast. What will drive traffic and generate an audience will not only be the publishers' commitment to ideas, but also a seamless delivery of content in real time. The recent tsunami coverage shows how the democracy of information works. Within hours, we were all connected to the most hard-hit areas. A digital camera and a laptop with a broadband connection are all that is required for entry into this new dynamic and decentralized media landscape.
This decentralization of information will also greatly change the revenue models of media. Today, audience size translates directly into dollars. Web sites with the most users charge the highest rates. In the coming world of Sexy Blog, political and societal change will also be important benchmarks. The number of eyeballs will be far less important than the behavior attached to those eyeballs.
For example the Parents Television Council, a family values group, generates indecency complaints through its web site - 99.8% of all indecency complaints about content on the Internet in 2003, according to the FCC. The number of visitors to this site is irrelevant. They have already shown the power to change public policy. As outgoing FCC commissioner Michael Powell said, "Hey, it doesn't matter where these complaints came from. These are still Americans being outraged."
On the left, sites such as MoveOn.org have showed a tremendous ability to organize their users in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago. They not only delivered 500 people in the middle of a cornfield during the 2004 Iowa Caucus, they also influenced major corporations as evidenced during their organized boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting. Pepsi is just one sponsor that pulled ads due to broadcasts that seemed biased.
The revolution will also fuel the need for tools that simplify the creation of content. Take iPod, for example. Phase two of the revolution has begun with "pod-casting." A pod-cast is like an audio magazine. Users receive regular audio programs delivered via the Internet to listen to at their leisure. Music novices can now "program" playlists and be their own disc jockeys.
The Internet is a vehicle that gives personal taste global distribution. Now that everyone can be a media guru, how will users sift through the near infinite stream of ideas and content? If a million trees fall in the forest, will there be enough ears for their crash to be heard? The anticipated answer is that virtual communities will hear.
A virtual community is no different from a real one. Both are made up of self selecting members who have similar needs and interests. Internet communities have rules and guidelines that participants must follow, and volunteer watchdogs ensure that bloggers follow these rules. Offenders are banished from the collective. And perhaps most importantly, consensus will be achieved as a byproduct of this community sharing resources.
To create the sexiness needed for this model to succeed, two opposite entities will need to merge: technologists and content creators. So far, attempts at this new synergy have been shotgun weddings with less than stellar results. Big technology companies such as Microsoft have bought smaller content companies, such as Mondo Music, seeking to assimilate these new employees and their ideas into their corporate hive. It hasn't worked. Microsoft understands very well how ones and zeros can create useful software. What it doesn't do well is create great platforms for creativity and individuality. The AOL/Time Warner merger is another example of how not to create the next killer application. The cultural clash between software engineers and creatives is just too vast to allow a win-win.
The desired synergy must be left to smaller, more nimble companies who understand how to generate and maintain an audience. The emergence of sexy blogs is, by definition, a creative process. Sophisticated bloggers will be far more interested in sharing ideas than creating video compression software. These bloggers will naturally align themselves with companies that can provide simple and easy-to-use tools. A great violinist's job is not to create and manufacture a Stradivarius. It is to use the gift of music to create emotion in others.
That opportunity awaits you right around the cyber corner.
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