The blog, your digital message in a bottle

We've been focusing on web desktops the last week or so. With Netvibes and Google under our belt, our sights turn to Windows Live. None of them are perfect and each has quirks that have us tearing our hair out or what's left of it. Nevertheless, they are strong indicators of where the next battleground will be, i.e. the next generation Web desktop. Even as consumers, we are starting to outsource our digital assets. From keeping our precious email on our harddrives, we now think nothing of giving our inboxes to Google, Yahoo or Hotmail for safekeeping. We post our photos to Flickr and even our blogs reside on someone else's servers. So it's no stretch of the imagination to see one day, all our digital property will be found everywhere except in our homes. Hence the beginnings of a new battle of owning your web desktop. Eventually, our computers will come full circle becoming like the terminal consoles of yesteryear except they're in color.

Those of us with children do well to heed their digital behavior. My kids in their teens hardly use email anymore preferring to instant message each other. I suspect like fax, email will never go away but the now generation and beyond will prefer to drop into each other's digital space and leave their friends private or public messages. While the intention is the same as email, I believe the behaviorial change is significant. Whether you like or dislike social networks like MySpace and its lookalikes, it is indicative of a new digital social order. Owning a blog is just a fragment of your web persona. I have no doubt that blogs will evolve to become complex conversations and collaborations. We'll probably look back one day and compare our blogging technology to something close to the time when we put messages in bottles and cast them out to sea hoping someone will find them...