No, it’s not going to happen. There will always be websites and blogs, but the power of the website is going to diminish. What with RSS feeds now embedded into MyYahoo or iGoogle personalization is gaining grown. Why go to various websites when I can get all the latest headlines, posts, articles from my personalized page, that I control and setup.
Search will still rule, we can’t have everything we need all the time within our personalized page. When something hits the news, we search and search and pull together various sites to come up with enough information that satisfies that search. But as we add more and more plugins and widgets to our personalized pages, we don’t need to search anymore. I love Wikipedia, they give you an indepth snapshot a la PBS, you know for the most part it’s truthful. With widgets, they now will provide that snapshot, whether it’s a plugin for the World Cup soccer tournament or updates on the baseball playoffs.
Content will always be king. I think Google just wants you to create more unique content, although is there some narrowing down of all this content going on? With all of these blogs posting similar videos and links, do we need all of that? I think there will just be a natural evolution. Those who write good posts or find the best links and videos for a certain sector, and do it consistently, build a following, will stay in the publishing hashing game. I guess the question is what’s next, how do you separate your site from others?
When you do a search you land on a few different sites, and then you do another search to get more opinions or quotes. What’s a story after all, it’s a picture, quotes, videos, statistics, expert opinions, those who were there, those who’ve been there in similar situations, those how were part of the story before (x-teammates or senators). So, a site pulls all that information together, but could that just be delivered in a widget. You’ve got Digg, where users weigh in on what’s the most important story. You’ve got NY Times, most emailed stories. The Internet is about shortening steps–I think the sites that survive do it out of a passion for what they’re covering as publishers, and then do it consistently. Same as always Internet or none, that’s how it works.
This is a rough piece and I’ll write more on this later.