Now let me explain.

Over the summer I wrote several pieces about this emerging idea called Blogging 2.0. My sense at the time was that successful bloggers (more on how to define this below) would need to continue to churn out valuable content, network effectively in their space, get linked by high quality websites, and so forth, but would also need to engage in the emerging social media space, on red hot communications platforms such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and Disqus.

In Blogging 2.0: from surviving to thriving, I wrote:

My sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).

…successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.

So my overriding theory was that activities outside of the “home blog” should hopefully in the end lead to increased activity and participation back on the home site.

Now we’re hitting the end of the year. Social media participation and engagement is more intense than ever, drawing time and attention spans ever further away from these very home sites, and that’s not really even touching on the “distributed conversation” side of things!

The basic question that I’m left with these days is a somewhat existential one I suppose: can participation on social media sites become its own good?

Or in slightly less lofty terms: can successful bloggers evolve into some sort of successful blogger/microblogger hybrid? In specific terms, this means less posts and less words and less engagement on home sites in favor of relatively more of all of that on social media and microblogging platforms.

My sense is that yes they can, and yes, they will probably have to in this quickly evolving environment.

To quote myself on Twitter today:

Meaning that from now on *probably* the best bloggers will also tend to be the best microbloggers/social media publishers, and vice versa

Now, back to the definition of “successful blogger” for just a second. Obviously this can mean many different things. If it means making money, the new blogger/microblogger hybrid will change the equation some. I’m particularly fascinated at the moment with advertising services (such as Magpie for Twitter and Adjix for link shrinking) that seek to bring revenue directly to social media participants. This industry niche is extremely new though and is struggling with initial resistance from purists even as start-ups in the space figure out their own business models. But the tremendous movement in the overarching social media space will surely bring more players, more competition, and innovation.

Aside from the money part, success may mean things like learning opportunities, personal branding, product/service promotion, networking, and all round high fun and online conversatin’. All of these things seem to play into the blogging/microblogging hybrid model extremely well.

All of that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to have substantially evolved (or you can say changed, perhaps!) opinions about this topic in a few months. That’s how quickly things are moving.

To back up a few steps though, the definition of blogging 2.0 is still evolving, and like the strange and nebulous term web 2.0 can and likely will mean different things to different people. When I started looking into this brave new world of blogging 2.0 back in May, I came in with the assumption that blogging 1.0 was a relatively more ordered world where blog publishers:

• Published stories (and the more the better)
• Created value around a topic or topics
• Attracted readers, and hopefully actively participated in comments
• Built a destination presence that brought back readers regularly
• Made money through the page views and ad impressions generated

Riley however goes back a little bit further than my point of origin, hearkening back to a time where there was a “collective sense of community” in which bloggers linked out and shared information out of love for the community and medium as opposed to a more bottom line-driven contemporary environment.

My personal ethos is that “serious bloggers” should have a great passion for what they’re doing and should enjoy adding value to the online conversation and web community. And a healthy desire to accrue traffic, build a web presence, and eventually make money probably will help to keep things rolling after the initial excitement wears off. In 2008, bloggers can be self-serving but also should aggressively pursue social media platforms like Disqus, Twitter, and FriendFeed. The thing is though that you can’t fake your participation. If it’s brazenly self-serving or anemic, it will not reap any great benefits.

In any event, Riley goes on to taking a position that I agree with, which is that actively embracing the social media side of blogging 2.0 can also help to drive traffic back to the “home site.” Which then hopefully become regular readers and go through the same list posted above.

Meanwhile, blogging 2.0 is just at the beginning of its evolution. Louis Gray has a very cool post up over the weekend in which he created a leaderboard based around the top bloggers that he has “shared” via Google Reader over the course of July (full disclosure: Online Media Cultist is on the board, yessir!).

This represents the leading edge of how new tools and community sites can empower bloggers to use their sites in new and innovative ways. So while it’s very natural for old school bloggers in particular to be frightened by a chaotic blogging 2.0 environment –where conversations are taking place all over the web, and attribution/credit/link love can sometimes be hard to come by – there’s a great deal to embrace and even take advantage of.