Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion is writing about the need for bloggers to enlarge their horizons beyond problogging if they are to make any sort of living. Yesterday, we had Duncan Riley saying much the same thing.

Today Robert Scoble, in a comment, is calling bloggers, “amateurs” — a word I’ve used occasionally — and mainstream media journos, “pros”. This is happening all over. The penny seems to have dropped that the confined world of the blogosphere is not Dick Whittington’s London Town, where the streets were paved with gold — in his imagination at least.

Rubel is even predicting a downturn in conventional blog-type advertising and advising bloggers to write original reports for high-end clients instead.

We can take some satisfaction here at Syntagma since we’ve been saying this for quite a while, much to the fury of the blogosphere’s old guard. Our early adoption of Web 4.0 (the Hyperbolic Holographic Semantic Web) has caused a lot of consternation on this earthquake-prone ground. [Wink]

So what are we really to make of this? If the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is about making better sense of data and content, so that real people can use it, it will be an improvement on the dreary 2.0 stuff. Google has been at work on this for a while now — person-centric IPTV advertising (pitching adverts to a single person’s interests) is one of its major goals.

Here we’ve been talking about “content platforms” in this context too. A network magazine is a simple example of a content platform, as distinguished from a technology platform, like WordPress, which, although it publishes content, doesn’t manage it in an overall context. “Metapublishing” is what content platforming is all about, and that plays directly into the Semantic Web because it organizes multi-domain content into packages which appeal to the same sort of reader.

Content platforms need quality content because they’re presenting it to an astute choice-driven audience, not to random search engines sniffing for keywords. The new search engines will seek out connections and intelligent comments that have real meaning and value to the reader. Google is beginning to do this with its sidebars of extra choices within a search topic.

Content platforms are publishers’ contributions to the Semantic Web.

On the advertising front, we’ll have to raise our game to give better metrics if we are to draw in the larger, more stable, advertisers that Rubel writes about. Here at Syntagma we’re concentrating on big retail advertising since it’s always there. Even in an economic slump, you’ll find the retailers advertising more not less.

Ad tracking software will have to do better. We’ve been testing out an open source version in recent weeks. Imagine sitting at a piano with the full orchestral score of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in front of you, and trying to play it from scratch. Oh, and you’ve never played a piano before.

So there are problems to overcome. I think, though, the best “bloggers” will become “pros” and the best “blog networks” will develop content platforms that will attract the big mainstreamers.

The tide is turning fast now. Some are having to play catchup already. Others haven’t even started.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls …