There used to be four distinct reasons that people would ask me to help them with blogging.

1– A person had an idea or a story and wanted to be heard. It isn’t always about money or business — see the political blogger, and the personal blog.

2– A person wanted to make extra money blogging. This doesn’t happen as much, at least not on a full-time income level. But to some, even $5 — 20 a day is a huge help.

3– A person, (especially an entrepreneur) or a larger company wanted more visibility. If you want to be seen, and to have multiple opportunities to be seen again, you blog, and you keep blogging.

4– Better search engine results or traffic. I would get a letter from someone who had X amount of traffic that would bring them Y conversions. And all they wanted was more of each.

Search engine traffic is an excellent fall-back reason to keep blogging. I’ve always maintained that it shouldn’t be the only reason one blogs, but that it also doesn’t make sense to ignore its powers in that area.

Did you notice it?

The one over-arching reason is exposure.

And who can blame them. Who hasn’t dreamed of being the star of a story picked up by Digg, or Mashable or the Associated Press? I’ve been lucky enough to choreograph or witness all three circumstances in my career, and as long as success isn’t expected overnight, it is attainable.

But more often than not, following success, I’m left in the irritating position of having to say “I told you so.”

Don’t get me wrong, being on the front page of Digg, or at the top of Tweetmeme, getting thousands of visitors from Reddit, your server rocked by StumbleUpon, and especially being written up on Mashable is every bit of an exhilarating feeling as you think. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just submitting someone else’s story, in the background orchestrating exposure, or part of the team being covered, it’s fantastic.

For a little while.

When the ride is over, it’s back to reality. You can scream “again! again!” as many times as you like, but you learn that it’s the convergence of the story, the timing and the barometer of Rome’s mob that determines if and when you’ll be on top again.

Most bloggers never make it. And yet, the majority of the bloggers I talk to are blogging because they were sold that dream at some point.

“Become a blogger, and you’ll get on Digg and then your problems are over!”

Not so fast cupcake.

One of the things that struck me when listening to Kevin Kelly’s talk about the next 5000 days of the web (thanks @salemonz), is his summary of the Laws of Media.

In this presentation on the next 5000 days of the Web, given in December 2007, Kelly said:

And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basically becomes one media platform. And while there’s many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other.

So that the laws of media, such as: the fact that copies have no value. The value’s in the uncopiable things. The immediacy, the authentication, the personalization — the media wants to be liquid; the reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are “free” as in “beer,” but “free” as in “freedom.”

And the network effects rule — meaning that the more you have, the more you get.

The first fax machine — the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we’re going to see. Attention is the currency.

As you can see, I’ve emphasized about the idea that the copy is not valuable, and that the value is in the uncopyable.

This is the ultimate doom or boom of the ebook, the magic or mess of article marketing, the victory or vacuousness of video and the evolution or extinction of the blog.

Because the ultimate raspy gasp of the blog echoes here: the easiest way for you to get attention is by producing ideas and concepts that other people will share.

Then you want people to unite around the ideas that come from that share — that’s how thought leadership can turn into profit, by using your brilliance as an anchor for creating your Tribe.

It is then, therefore essential that you create original enough discourse that in both style (what you said, how you understand and convey it) and in formats (a link, an embed) that are easily traced back to you. The most surefire way to do that is to inject your essence, which can’t truly be copied.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but perhaps no one can say it the way you do, or make it as understandable, or duplicate your complex perspective.

And so we want to be both copied and share, for fame, for profit, for fun, for recognition.

If they copy but don’t share, they may throw the “you” part of it out. Great for contributing to society, not so much for any business that is uplifted from having one’s innovation recognized.

If they share, you can’t always track the sharing, but if it’s shared in a complete format, do you really care?

Especially if you know that this is where you can really see a return in value, you probably won’t. it’s more important that 500k people saw your YouTube video than being able to name each person, when they saw it and whether it was a Tuesday. So you “share to gain”, as Kelly says in the same presentation. Much better situation for you, whether you can track it or not.

So much so that so for many, blogging becomes a game of wanting to share something as close to uncopyable as possible that is also extraordinarily shareable.

We want the hyper-viral effect without having our intellectual property ripped off.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to strike that balance?

We’re going to talk about that next, and take a closer look at the mega-viral or hyper-viral model — that’s really a pipe dream — in social media.

As to the question in the title?

Yes, I think the hype of mega-viral success has killed the very valuable reality of what is a quite impressive set of tools between blogging and social media. Can we revive it?

Bear with me for a few more posts. I have an answer for that too.

Okay, we were talking about what is going to succeed social media and blogging. And it may be something that already exists.

Let’s look into what’s potentially happening for Blogs first.

Jigga Wha?

1– Widespread Business Adoption of Lifestreaming?

Possibly. To us it may seem like everyone already “gets” blogging, but I meet people every day who either ask me “What is a blog?” or “Why should businesses blog?”

The vast majority of people offline are not as plugged into the web as we are. It’s a fact — if you’re reading this, the vast majority of the population is less web savvy than you are. Much less if you’ve written something like this.

That means if we progress to business streaming, we’ll have to present a compelling reason why consumers should wade in our stream as opposed to, say, Facebook’s.

Or meet them there.

That means that to capture the minds of that set, lifestream for business will have to be something more than aggregation. A one-stop shop for everything “your company/product/service”? That’s not big enough, or exciting, or enough of a benefit yet to people who aren’t fans already.

But make it incorporate and organize everything that happens in a mirco-niche of your industry, making you the authority?

Perhaps. But then what? And why can’t that be accomplished from a blogging platform like WordPress anyway?

Aggregation isn’t a progression. It’s just… aggregation. It’s the “spare” part of heir and the spare. Nothing near useless, but not a replacement either.

2– App-etizing.

Again, maybe.

There’s some part of your business that can be made into an application for the web, the phone or the desktop. Which is it, or is it all of the above? And are you doing it for marketing or for the sake of the app itself? And isn’t your site more than what it can do? What about the conversation?

Is it the internal or external conversation that converts browsers to buyers?

Plus that’s not a successor to blogging and social media, it’s a companion.

3– Moblogs– Special Blogs Created for Mobile marketing.

You’ve got to give folks phone content, which crosses with apps. But how much does that cost and how does the average small or local business make this option cost-effective? What if the audience wants more than the mobile version of your blog –suppose they want to go from subscription to content to purchase without putting down their Blackberry?

We’ll have to come back to that. Because this is a great complement, but it’s not evolution.

An evolved progression would have to provide a Web-based answer, not just a mobile-based one.

4– Audio Blogging (Also known as podcasting)

Seems like the next natural step, at least as far as text blogging is concerned.

And it’s already here, sort of. If iTunes, Pandora, last.fm, the old Napster and the new Rhapsody haven’t convinced you of that, grab some food to take back to your bomb shelter while you’re topside.

The thing about audio though, is that it’s not a replacement for text blogging, necessarily. You’ll still have people who prefer to consume by reading — it’s hard to “skim” an audio.

Yet, the more mainstream your audience, the less this is a problem.

But it’s an idea. Try blogging via audio all next week and measure the results. It might surprise you how easy it is to do and how much your audience likes it.

Will it replace blogging by text completely? No. It’s not skimmable, it’s harder to share snippets of, which makes it more challenging as a marketing tool.

Seems to be much more addictive though — and you get more focused, undivided attention. Not to mention that if you make them downloadable, they can travel into other parts of your audience’s lives via iPod and the like.

Of course, there’s then the fact that you can’t link from within one part of an audio to within, say, another part of a video. Blogs can be configured to “know” me. Audio on a blogging platform can — audio AS the blog? There’s the hole.

5– Video blogging.

Some folks are doing video on some level — screencasting, slidecasting that becomes video, actual video. But we’re nowhere near saturation, despite what YouTube looks like. If you looked at Steve’s MindMap, you’ll see that some are speculating that blogs will become TV channels, or at least shows, and video blogging would plug right into this idea.

Video blogging is easier to adopt, even if you’ve got a camera shy face — screencasting and slidecasting may make more sense for you. It’s shareable via embed, but not in a way that ties the content permanently to its creator, and yet is still freely floating on the web.

Which I’m working on. But if I told you more about it, I’d have to kill you.

Ahem. Maybe we’ll talk about that another day.

For now, let’s move on to why social media and blogging even NEEDS an evolutionary next step. And one problem with blogs merging into social networks.

I’ve got a meeting this  afternoon but I may be back after, or it may be tomorrow morning. Best way to get the next post is to subscribe, or follow me on Twitter, where I’ll post the next link. See you then.

So today, I woke up particularly refreshed and jazzed about a workshop I want to give.

I asked people what they wanted, and they said a series of hands on lessons that will teach them how to use new media tools more effectively, and teach those of them who don’t know how to use them, where to start, and how to fit it into 15 — 30 minutes a day.

Then I realized how absolutely bored I was with answering the same questions about blogging and social media that I was 5 years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, it is fun applying the answers to new niches.

But I wanted to write something today about new media, and today, well I just felt like everything has been said.

I’m not alone in this, or at least in thinking along these lines.

Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone, created a new hash tag on twitter, #futureforward, so we can all discuss what’s happening after social media.

Steve Rubel, who is now lifestreaming, wrote a piece on how to capture attention in the era of the constant information flow.

And in reading comments on his blog, where you used to be able to find some of the most mentally stimulating conversations among my peers, I see a lot of .…

Well, bitchassed-ness, to be frank. Credit to Puff Daddy for the phrase.

(No, I am NOT calling him P. Diddy — you get ONE name change with me. It’s bad enough I ever called him Puffy.)

Which makes me ponder — is it time for me to start talking about what’s on the horizon?

Or will I be a part of the spammy fiasco that I feel partly responsible for when I started talking about RSS,  and later, Facebook?

Before we even get into that, though, it’s important to pause there. Because I only have ideas and theories, I don’t actually KNOW. I seem to make good guess by asking myself…

What IS Next?

Business Blogging got swallowed by the leveraging of Social media. It’s time for social media to start morphing into something greater. And yeah,  Steve has some good ideas in a later article and a mindmap about the future of blogging.

Which refined my question — as far as Business Marketing goes, what is the next step after blogging? Obviously the rest of social media. The two go hand-in-hand. But what comes after that?

Next, we’ll look at some of the usual suspects for blogging.