When Khris and I showed Robert Scoble Echo prior to the Launch at the Real-Time Crunchup he said "Wow, Blogs are Back!". I couldn't agree more. It looks like his sentiment is starting to propagate.
When I say Blogs are Back I mean that the balance between other forms of social media (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed etc) are now finding their rightful balance with the first and foremost social platform, Blogging.
This is not to suggest that other forms of interaction are going away, only that there is a natural equilibrium to be struck.
There are a number of factors that are helping this trend along.
They include:
- Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community - particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
- Facebook's continued resistance to true DataPortability
- The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
- A realization that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
- The broader themes of the Synaptic Web
I also discussed this with Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Marshall Kirkpatrick the other day on the BadHairDay podcast.
You can also see previous references to this in my 'What is Echo' post. I've also posted a more detailed account of how Echo fits into this notion on the JS-Kit blog.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have also posted on this. I also registered 'BlogsAreBack.com' (what should I do with it?).
I look forward to see what this new trend brings!