Yet Another Sign Blogs Are Here To Stay

Dave Sifry's excited about the first ever Technorati User Group (TUG) meeting to be held tonight in SF. So that's actually SFTUG to be proper. excited too. It's not every day that you're able to develop a [tool / service / application] or whatever you want to call it, that people are so excited about they get together to discuss the possibilities of it on their own free time. It reminds me of ColdFusion User Groups and the excitement around the meetings. It also makes me think about the bigger picture and what this tiny event means in the ever changing landscape of the internet and blogs in general. We're entering a new and exciting phase, not only from a social networking and information distribution perspective. This SFTUG meeting represents a fundamental shift in the focus of developers everywhere. When the dot com bubble was still inflating developers were working on all sorts of applications but the only feature those apps shared was diversity. Meaning, there was so much opportunity for new sites and apps because there were few authorities online in almost all verticals that you could literally develop a mortgage calculator and be famous nearly overnight. If you even think about developing a mortgage calculator now you'll be the laughing stock of your coworkers. Now that we have authorities in most fields online from NBA insiders its not as easy to develop an app and become famous overnight. That being said, there's a new and emerging sector online that's maturing before our very eyes and that's blogs. From blog search engines like Feedster to blog aggregators like OddPost err API'me? Do your own research and see what conclusions you draw. Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the