The recent interview by E-consultancy.com with Shiny Media’s CEO Ashley Norris highlighted an essential element of blogging.

‘Sure, you can set up a blog easily enough but actually putting it on the map – and keeping it there – requires a lot of effort.”

My last blog touched on one of the many elements of achieving this, links. But there are many more which I’ll look at addressing in the near future.

I then visited Shiny Media’s site to read up on their vision for their company’s future and, by extension, the future of blogging which includes two main points:
• Video is the future for blogging.
• Like social networking, blogs target niche audiences

One wonders where we’d be without YouTube and the other video portals and can see that there could well be plenty of room on the www for various video portals to host what will be growing number of vodcasts posted on their sites.

It is easy to visualise video’s role in corporate blogging. Often used to give a human face to and provide contact with busy executives, a vodcast/video blog can provide a more intimate interaction for the viewer.

Corporate blogging is also feeding a niche. The choice of conversation, participants, audience and message of the blog itself creates a niche. Corporates use blogs to again humanise the company, introducing a range of employees, reveal research and opinion, as well as many less high-brow insights.

The CEO’s ‘Ashley’s rant’ section highlights that ‘everyone has a right to an opinion,’ after objecting to some main stream media’s opinion on bloggers.

With this in mind, the future of blogging is great. If everyone has an opinion and they choose to blog about it, there’ll be many new bloggers coming online. But how do we determine who has the most informed (or entertaining) opinions? How will we gauge bloggers credentials?

With more Web2.0 tools such as the plethora of tagging tools (digg, del.icio.us, etc) we will start to see a broader range of blog evaluation tools to identify credible bloggers, so that you can easily separate Granny’s Shanghai holiday tales from the CEO’s expansion plan for Chinese operations.

The transparency of blogging “disses” the plugging of products or using a blog as a blatant alternative advertising medium. Corporate blogging is to PR as PR is to advertising. I.e. Corporate blogging has become the commentary, providing insight and examples to support products and services.

To answer my title question, blogging can really only expand in all directions, but we’ll rely increasingly on tools that help us identify which ones go in the direction of onwards and upwards.

Do you agree?