Blogs – Our “Morning Paper”

The first guys I worked for in the venture business, Milton and Bliss, used to sit at their desk and read the Wall Street Journal for 20 minutes over a cup of coffee before starting their day. It was an essential part of their daily routine.

That’s the way it was in my parent’s generation and largely still is in my generation. But it’s changing.

My brother and I were talking last night during the Richard Shindell concert. He mentioned a day last week when I didn’t blog in the morning. Neither did Jackson. And neither did Tony Alva. And neither did his daughter. My brother got to work, turned on his computer, and nothing was there. He felt empty. His morning paper wasn’t there.

I look at my kids and their start pages aren’t Yahoo or Google News. Its their MySpace page. That’s where their world is. It’s no wonder that Google paid MySpace $900 million to be the search provider on MySpace.

Blogs are the endgame for social networking. MySpace is the AOL of blogging. It’s where you go when you don’t know how to do it yourself. But with MySpace starting to rein in what people can do with their pages (for a host of good and bad reasons), they are seeding their own decline. A decline that will take a decade if AOL is a good proxy. In the next ten years, most people who want an online home will have a blog, it will be their online identity and their start page and much more.

I haven’t done it yet, but I should change my start page to my blog. That’s where I go to start my day and end my day. And I am hell bent to configure my blog with enough functionality that it can be my newspaper, my inbox, my tv, my radio, and my social network. It’s pretty damn close already.

That’s where all of this is going. We’ll program our online world and others will too. And we’ll start our day there instead of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. My best is many of you reading this are already there.