I don't know how Natalie Solent came across this piece by Perseus, but I'm glad she did because I've been wanting to read a piece like this for some time, doing some crude number crunching for the entire blogosphere, but haven't come across one on my travels lately. I know it's navel gazing, but I happen to like the look of my navel now that I'm a blogger but still relatively new to it. I didn't realise, for instance, how much more of an impact Movable Type makes in the multi-reader blogosphere (where I hope I live) than in the nano-readership blogosphere (where it apparently hardly registers).

So, will blogging march forward to cultural prominence, or will it be forgotten?

It's surely the top of the blogosphere, or, to switch to the metaphor used by Perseus, the most visible bit of the iceberg, which will make the difference. If something replaces blogs and blogging for the likes of you, me and Instapundit, then blogging is doomed. I can't see that happening. I see blogging evolving a lot, and in due course changing out of all recognition, but I believe the tradition we've all now started won't be broken. But I would say that wouldn't I?

Blogging is surely already being replaced for all those teenagers with one entry per month until last June when it stopped altogether, and with no readership beyond (a diminishing number of) their friends and family. They'll want something more like mobile teleconferencing. Souped-up mobile phones, in other words. The kids will mostly jump straight to that, even as we bloggers find our own more evolutionary path towards something very similar.

A technology – or perhaps I should say something more like a "software pattern" – doesn't die out merely because a teenage fashion wave overestimates its possibilities and doesn't grasp its costs properly. Blogging doesn't immediately give you the readership of the New York Times, just because, theoretically (technologically), it could. To blog well enough to want to keep at it, you have to be able to write reasonably well and to want to keep at that, and be willing to build your readership from tiny to not so tiny to non-tiny enough to make a difference. Maybe most people could do that, but they don't want to.

Or, you have to be content with a readership scoring between tiny and not so tiny, which for this blog I'm happy with because my most important reader here is me. I'm the reader (I'll be rootling through my archives in five years time ever if no one else wants to) whom I most want to entertain with my stuff here, with the rest of you being welcome to read my culture-or-whatever diary over my shoulder. And again, most people aren't content with that kind of arrangement either. Ergo, the blogging kit, for most of the people who've bought it, ends up gathering dust in the virtual cupboard under the stairs. But I don't think that signifies.