There’s been some discussion in the last few days about so-called “blogging 2.0”.

Here are a couple of quotes that explain the “new paradigm of blogging 2.0”.

via The Inquisitr:

If blogging 1.0 was about enabling the conversation on each blog, blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services. The conversation has matured and no longer is it acceptable to believe that as a content owner you hold exclusive domain over conversations you have started. Users/ readers today demand more than a conversation on one site, and blogging 2.0 facilitates this.

via Louis Gray:

Blogging 1.0 centered around who could:

• Amass the most page views
• Display the most ads
• Get the most comments
• Attract the most RSS subscribers

But then came along some inconvenient wrinkles to the mix:

• Full RSS feeds took page views away from the blog
• Readers installed ad filters, and didn’t click
• Comments started to live elsewhere
• Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories

The world of blogging has changed. Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it’s hard to understand for those who’ve always accepted things for what they are.

Call me blogtarded, but this “blogging 2.0” idea seems to be missing the most basic thing that has made the growth of blogging and Internet media interesting: the Internet is unrelentingly lowering the barriers to content publishing, to the point that it is becoming trivial to publish content.

You Can Do It

The fundamental idea of blogging is that You can do it.

You can go to a website, register and be blogging 5 minute later. You can install WordPress on a cheap Web hosting service and create your own site.

The same idea is central to podcasting. You can use a microphone and Garageband and podcast to the world. You can use your video camera, or even the camera built into your computer, to create a vlog or video podcast.

When people talk about blogging being about getting the most page views, getting the most comments or displaying the most ads, they are missing the point. Worrying about page views and ad views are traditional media concerns, and are not things that differentiate blogging.

And you have to wonder if we should be navel-gazing about “blogging 2.0”, when 55 million people in the US alone haven’t even caught up with “email 1.0”.

Blogging, vlogging and podcasting are still too hard for most people, and that makes the Internet a lot less interesting than it could be.

What makes blogging and podcasting interesting is that you can do it. You can make the “long tail” longer.

And when you make the long tail longer, that means there’s more tail for everybody. (Or something like that!)

Image: Márcio Cabral de Moura