"The Flack" Peter Himler posts an interview with my friend Steve Rubel who comments that books such as Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations may be old hat and that blogging itself may have peaked in terms of numbers.
Maybe so. Maybe so, but I think not.
In fact, Naked has surprised everyone by the steadiness of it's sales. The book is just short of its first birthday and sales, we strut to say, are still pretty solid. I ave noticed that sales have moved geographically away from American urban centers while taking off in English speaking communities of Asia, Europe and Canada. This trend seems to overlap with many historic technology adoption routes.
Steve and I tend to hang out in the front of a comet that has a Long Tail to it and he just might have been blinded by the light in his comments to Peter.
In our neighborhood world he's absolutely right. Blogging is an over-discussed topic. If you talk about Kryptonite bike locks in our neighborhood, people will roll their eyes heavenward or point to their throats and make gagging noises. But ours is a small neighborhood and this is a very big world despite current levels of connectedness.
I will be better persuaded that it has peaked when my wife's employer tells her a blog would be useful in her marketing efforts to attract more foster parents in Santa Clara County, California, or when shoppers at Edelman's most famous client stores know about great or shoddy deals because of what they read on a customers blog or YouTube clip.
What I do see and have written previously about is the normalization of blogging. Like movies, telephones, recorded music, television, PCs, trains and so on the real impoact comes after the mania, when everyday people start adopt technology to do everyday things. Blogging will pass its peak only after it becomes an everyday tool worldwide and we have some road to travel before that happens.
