The introspection goes on. What are blogs? Is blogging dying? Is a zeitgeist flip-flop underway?

Six months ago I wrote here on Syntagma that there were three types of blog, and therefore blogger. The categories were separated vertically, by motivation, into Primary, Secondary (Business) and Tertiary blogs.

But the argument has moved on to what will emerge from blogging, or survive, if you take a negative view? I think Jason Fry in yesterday’s WSJ got it about right. But here’s my two cents:

Blogs will survive in two strands:

1. As personal media for individuals to present themselves to the world though writing and conversation (comments).

2. As content creches to attract search queries and allow the content provider to make a return through contextual advertising and affiliate income.

Both are sturdy growths of the blogosphere which will remain valid long after the frothy Web 2.0 services ending in “r” crash out of the scene through bankruptcy or the withdrawal of VC funding.

Blogs and blogging are essential for both these strands to optimize themselves, so blogs will survive in these forms. They may merge with other types of Internet information providers to be named something else. But the essence of what we now call blogging will go on. It’s too useful and too successful a medium to be caught up in a zeitgeist flip-flop.

As personal media and content creches, blogging will continue to attract attention, but only among those who want these specialized outlets. The high point of the blogging “craze” may well be over. the best part is still to come.

A while back, I wrote a little tongue-in-cheek piece here on Syntagma about sunglasses with RSS feeds. Daft? Not so fast.

Scoble’s been telling the tale about a watch with RSS. Yes, a watch. Not only that but you can look up your stock prices too. Here’s the gen:

“Danny Sullivan walks in … He could do anything, but what does he do? He walks up to us and gives me s**t about his SPOT watch that he just bought. Turns out the RSS aggregator that the SPOT system has isn’t all that great (he wants me to get on to the team about the RSS features …). I tell him I’ll make sure the team hears about his feature request. Danny then launches into a sales pitch for the SPOT watch to Matt [Cutts]. Turns out Danny’s [Matt?] into Swatch watches and showed us off all the features of his new watch. … [Danny] pulls up the stock quote feature on his SPOT watch. Looks up GOOG (the stock quote for Google). Looks at Matt and says ‘you had a good day.’ Then pulls up MSFT. Looks at me and says ‘you had a good day too.’ ”

Is there no imaginative impossibility that these Valley geeks can’t conjure up? What’s the difference between that and Magick? They may not have wands and pointy hats these days, but somewhere in the software code there must be an Abracadabra … at the very least.

Jason Fry of The Wall Street Journal mulls over the current meme that blogging is on Death Row. Its demise has been grossly exaggerated, he concludes.

The conversation has centered around some very dubious statistics. Technorati’s 28 million blog index is known to be far short of the true picture. The Blog Herald has estimated a figure of 200 million — this takes in the astonishing number of blogs in China, plus other non-English-language blogs.

Moreover, if you go with the Technorati numbers, only 10 percent of them are regularly updated. Many more are just abandoned. One of my own abandoned blogs, ditched five months ago, still has a PR of 5 and appears on Google’s search page for the name, above that of the blog which replaced it. Lack of reliable statistics dog the blogosphere and attempts to make sense of it.

Gallup claims that 66 percent of Internet users say they never read blogs at all. But, says Fry, “Internet veterans may spy the factory-standard Blogger header or see Comments, Permalinks and Trackbacks and know they’ve landed on a blog, but this isn’t obvious to everybody — including, one imagines, Internet users being polled.” Gallup has admitted this distortion in their poll results.

Fry, who himself runs a successful baseball blog, concludes, “Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.

“My bet, he writes: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening …”

He also thinks that big blog acquisitions were always destined to be a passing phase as media companies sought to jump on the bandwagon. Deals like Time Warner’s $25 million acquisition of Weblogs Inc. “will be emblematic of a brief, bygone time”. What he sees as “the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money” won’t be the last word on the subject.

” … blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they’ll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation.”

And that last bit is what attracted me to blogging in the first place. Just because the dilettantes, the ships who pass in the night, and the simply-curious pass away from the scene, leaving a hard core of serious writers and publishers, doesn’t mean blogging will fade away. It will, in my view, be stronger. Good blogs will have larger audiences and attract better-paying advertising.

Blogging will become a true industry based around personal media techniques. We may have to change the name, though, and generically merge with other Internet information providers.

Then blogging really will be dead. But, as with Kings, we’ll cry, long live blogging.

Warning: Tangent, Digression, and Political Rant follows:

Winston Churchill once said, “If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law”.

Here in England we are stuffed with laws and regulations, 60 percent of them coming straight from Brussels, a foreign country. The Blair administration spews out its own tidal wave of legislation too, much of it ill-conceived and impossible to administer. A great deal of it impacts adversely on personal freedoms.

In a recent example, the Mayor of London was suspended from office for a month by an unelected committee appointed by that fount of all ignorance, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. The Mayor’s offence? Badmouthing a journalist late at night after a few drinks. Yes, the remarks were offensive in themselves, but how come a bunch of nobodies, answerable to nothing but their own opinions, have the power to suspend an elected Mayor of London?

It all comes back to the authoritarian personality of Tony Blair himself.

That great Lockeian journalist and defender of Liberty, William Rees-Mogg, captures it perfectly in today’s Times (London). Blair doesn’t believe in “due process”, a principle of English, and now American, law since Magna Carta. In its place, he puts that most dangerous of Continental European concepts: Political Will.

The Prime Minister knows what the issue is. He is against due process as such. He has written a most extraordinary attack on the whole concept in yesterday’s Observer. The article is so incautious that he must have written it himself.

“In theory,” Tony Blair writes, “traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.” This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Minister’s conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos [Antisocial Behaviour Orders] without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law.

Rees-Mogg can find only one word to describe him: “antinomian”. The Oxford Dictionary defines that as someone who is “released by grace” from observing the moral law.

However did we end up with this man?