Will Blogging Be Big?

I was talking to Greg Lindsay today, who used to write for Inside.com – which, sadly, was one of my less successful investments.

He is working on a story for a business magazine which will go unnamed that asks the question that everyone seems to be asking these days – will blogging be big? Of course, I told him, its going to be big. It already is big in terms of audience although nobody in the traditional media wants to admit it.

But Greg, like everyone else, seems to be focused on Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis. I told him that Nick and Jason are smart and doing good stuff, but he should look somewhere other than Gawker and Weblogs Inc if he really wants to see the future of blogging.

I pointed him to Technorati, Kinja, Feedburner, BlogAds, and a host of other interesting developments. I think the Internet is often a big head-fake. It’s not the obvious business model that often generates the most value. It’s the company that figures out to get inside of this beautiful open system and expose hidden value that often wins the biggest.