On Blogging Australia

I have a couple of friends who are fairly well known within their respective professions. Their blogs are also fairly well known. It may be that blogging helped to establish their international fan base, but it was only one factor to their success. Truth be told, they are good at what they do. Blogging may have helped by opening some doors a little faster - but it is what they do that makes them special. Blogging certainly did help to establish their reputations of thought leadership within their areas of expertise.

They blog for pleasure now - when they have something specific to say, or when the muse takes them, and this is OK.  They don’t watch their Technorati rank, or check their numbers of RSS readers. They don’t run advertising on their blogs, and probably don’t need the money that this would bring in.

In other words, they don’t really need to blog any more.

So what happens next? If you are blogging to show your expertise within a profession (as opposed to directly deriving income from the blog), and you’ve got that reputation now, what do you do? I suppose that it comes down to motivation - if you were only ever blogging for one purpose, and that purpose is fulfilled, then there is no need to continue. The fact that my friends continue to blog means that they really are doing it for pleasure - and to maintain a connection to friendships already forged.

For the rest of us, is there a time that you can see beyond blogging? When you will get the feeling of community from the successor to FaceBook?