Right now, blogs are still in their infancy. Look back just a few years. It was just a handful of the population. They were relatively useless and basically brushed off. Now we have large companies backing blogs (see Google’s Blogger). We have solid, open-source, “poeticly-coded” software like WordPress. Blogs also are increasing in prestige and reliability. It’s not hard to see bloggers make appearances on or in conventional media outlets. I see Arianna Huffington (from The Huffington Post) on Countdown all the time. The entire industry is changing, but we have a long way to go.

What we’ll be stepping towards in the future is something I’m un-cleverly going to refer to as Blog Networking. Let’s talk a bit about what sort of networking tools we have right now. First, we, of course, have Technorati. This is definitely a step in the right direction. I can see all the blogs that are linking in to me. I can also search on keywords. It’s truly the best blog directory site out there. Current downsides: Still not full market adoption. Some blogs are not on there. Pinging still is not perfect. It’s good, but we will want to improve this.

Other sites, MyBlogLog. This site is odd. I like using it, but I’m still not convinced it serves any purpose as of yet. One thing I like is keeping a reader community. People can join your blog community and interact. We’ll return to this idea shortly.

I also want to point out sites like CoComment. These sites offer the ability to track your comments on all the sites you visit. This is what we will really be talking about. This is where the blogosphere is headed. A compilation between comment-tracking, Technorati, and MyBlogLog.

So what do I picture? I picture something that behaves like this. All personal blogs (like this one, but not like TechCrunch or TUAW, etc) are not just blogs but the person themselves. For instance, the URL http://www.dbachrach.com/blog/ does not just represent this blog but me, Dustin Bachrach. This is very derivative of OpenID. The URL is then a more general expression of the person rather than the physical markup (the blog content). So picture an OpenID-like network, decentralized, across the entire blogosphere. We are basically there. Everyone’s personal blog is an identifier for themselves, we just have not utilized it nor created an authentication system for it.

So why would we want an OpenID-like structure for the blogosphere? When I go to another blog, and I leave a comment, I fill out a form. On WordPress, this form includes name, email, and URL. What I picture is that I will type in my URL. And then I would click an authenticate button, and I would be able to prove that I am in fact Dustin Bachrach. I can then type a comment, and it would be posted onto that blog entry. Here’s where it starts to get interesting. My server, the one that served the authentication request, now knows that I just commented on someone’s blog. It can then go and pick up my comment, the ones before it, and the comments posted in the future. There is so much power here. Now say I’m at the WordPress dashboard getting ready to write a new post. I see in the sidebar that someone’s made another comment on a comment I’ve made over on a different blog. I can easily go and read up on other people’s thoughts.

This also let’s me keep a storage and archive of all the comments I’ve made across the web. And it’s very efficient. No need for central databases that store this info. I can store the data myself. Let’s keep going. What else can we do? I can now show a list of the last comments I’ve made across the web in my own blog sidebar. We are now starting to recreate blog rolls. Blogs I read, I will typically comment on. Thus the tracking of comments shows which blogs I like the most. If we incorporate MyBlogLog functionality, like tracking who’s been to blogs based on page hits instead of commenting, we can aggregate the data to get a better understanding of what I like to read and where I like to read.

We are now starting to stretch these little lines across the web. Little links from a comment I made over on this site can link back to me personally and then also my entire list of comments. Say the author of the post that I commented on wants to read through the comments people have written. He sees I wrote something that he agrees with. He can now click my name and instantly be brought to my blog, or my vCard, or my blogroll, or my comments all over the web. He can easily read any comments I’ve made.

Are you starting to see the social networking that is developing from this? We can start cross-referencing blogging habits and we can even start to judge popularity of bloggers or specific posts. We can start implementing better track-back facilities to inform bloggers when stories about them are written without the centralization of Technorati. Ever look at the number of links you get on Technorati and then compare it to the number of track-backs your post actually gets. Track-backs are missing so many posts. With a better pinging and notifying utilities, when a blogger writes a post, we can go through and auto notify all the websites we reference. These are more little lines being drawn between blogs. More social networking is emerging. When a blogger links to another blogger, we can now also provide them with vCard info, previous comments on this blog, previous comments on the entire web, most popular blog posts, etc. The list goes on. There are so many possibilities.

And in truth we are very close. We already have these link-backs in place. They just are not fully utilized. We have stable ideas/technologies like RSS and permalinks and soon better OpenID integration. What I’m talking about is not revolutionary, just the next evolution, as we progress towards decentralizing blog tracking options and allow individual blogs to do the networking for themselves. A lot of these features are very exciting, and the only thing holding us back from creating a better blogosphere is adoption. New technologies like this won’t catch on unless everyone uses them. We need to start fully supporting things like OpenID, and soon, who knows, you might be browsing all comments by a certain one of your readers who frequents your site once a week and who likes blog x, blog y, and blog z, and has linked to you 7 times. This is just the start, and where we will head, we don’t know. But I’m very excited.

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