Dave about the shape of weblog software

Weblog software is going to be like mail servers. Lots of ways to deploy, every niche filled. For the masses, services like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Blogging servers for corporations, inside and outside of the firewall. For schools, for the military, specialized systems for lawyers, librarians, professors, reporters, magazines, daily newspapers. The next President will have a blog. Writing for the Web, the prevailing form of publishing in the early 21st Century, will come in many sizes and shapes, flavors and styles. It won't be one-size-fits-all. Open formats and protocols will make this possible. I'd bet on the formats and protocols we're using now, RSS 2.0, OPML and the Blogger API.

I completely agree on the fact that what we are currently calling "weblog software" is going to become a big and variegated business. But I also think that it it's not going to be only about publishing.

Not everybody needs or wants to publish on the web, but everybody will need to manage his "presence" on the web. Weblogs are revolutionary because they allow us to show our web side, but this won't be necessarily only about writing posts. What we are seeing today is the first step in this direction: cheap, powerful and scalable software that anybody can use and that allow to manage a wealth of information, input and output, on the web.

I also agree that this new reality will have to be made of standards a significant part of developers will agree upon and will rely on existing and new kind of services that will glue it all together.