As someone who has been doing this for more than half a decade, the only thing that amazes me more than the utter ubiquity of blogging is the utter proliferation of blogging trends and tools.
A newer trend in blogging (at least to me, anyhow) is the use of a blog to assemble a well researched academic text. There are two excellent examples i’ve been keeping up with daily. The first, The Long Tail, is (in short) about the 80/20 rule, based on a Wired Article i very much enjoyed. On the second, The Music of Rufus Wainwright, composer and professor Roger Bourland invites discussion of topics ranging from form and phrase structure to the challenges of accurate transcription – all from his forthcoming book examining Rufus’s music in a classical light.
In the tools category, Blogger now fluently accepts phone-posts directly from your cell with no setup required. You simply email a text message or picture mail from your phone to go@blogger.com – blogger sets up a randomly named blogspot page to receive your messages (identified via your phone # and/or phone email) until you claim it and (potentially) assign further messages to another blog. As you’ve seen from my recent posts, it can even upload your pictures via FTP. Read more at Go Blogger. Currently supports posts from Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile.
In a blogging world of academic tomes and phone posts and the dreaded LJ-meets-Facebook bohemeth that is Myspace it boggles my mind to think that five years ago i was the only boy on the internet singing songs specifically to be published on my blog.