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Jon has written an excellent post which poses the question: "Private blogging....does it make sense? Are there any other solutions out there? Is blogging even so important and so entrenched as part of the digital horizon that we need to discuss this?" I suggest you read the post in its entirety before reading my responses to his post below.

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The blogging phenomenon is not new

Blogging has only gotten a specific nominal identity during the past two years. However, it has existed prior to this whole "boom" of blogging services; they just used to be called webpages. Even after the first string of static webpages, there was that huge boom of .plans, which served as blogs. Blogs are simply tools that allow for self-publishing on the web without a steep learning curve.

Blogs can be used for anything

Because of the general open-endedness of the blogging medium, it can be extended for almost any purpose. The first natural fit [and the area where it's made the biggest impact] is in the media - the ability to self-publish and be quickly aggregated to be read is a great extension of grassroots media. The Triangle Bloggers Conference was primarily geared around grassroots journalism more than anything.

Companies like Gawker Media are trying to make blogs like magazines - minus the publishing costs and with greater viral marketing. Whether the blogging medium can have a sustainable income is something that only time will tell.

There are many people out there writing great specific blogs that focus on a specific theme which are educational in nature. This fulfills the original "research" intent of the Internet.

But the greatest use of blogs do not come from any of these areas. They come from 18-year old girls.

"The average blogger is a teenage girl who uses her blog to inform her friends of school happenings"

Unfortunately, the vast number of users do not use blogging for any of the 'useful' reasons that were listed above. Looking at the blog market share data, the greatest movers are coming from sites like LJ, Blogger, and TypePad. TypePad excluded [for a variety of reasons I don't really want to get into], the biggest blogging sites are those that are geared around the concept of 'journaling' more than blogging.

Xanga has a whole thriving community around high school and college students who update about nothing in particular at all!

These types of users [casual users] use blogging services to simply keep their friends updated on happenings in their personal lives. And to answer Jon's question ... these are the people who these "private blogs" mainly appeal to. People who wanted a limited audience.

Not everyone writes for any useful purpose - a lot of people write simply to waste time and keep connected with friends. And these people have privacy expectations which are very difficult to maintain on the Internet. And I'm going to gander a guess that Jon's friend falls under this category of user. The user who writes about semi-personal things and wishes some level of privacy.

"Privacy" and "private blogs"

The concept of "private" blogs raises the issue of the user to control who reads their blogs. Unfortunately, tools are so crude that users only have a choice between "everybody" [public] or "nobody" [private]. And many internet newbies have trouble grappling this concept. What further compounds this issue is that new bloggers believe their voice will be "lost in the crowd" and blog things that should not be blogged [personal stuff].

Blogging is not easy - the balance required in maintaining your privacy, the privacy of people in your life, with the tendency of many bloggers to blog about anything causes many problems; people have lost their jobs over what they've blogged!

But this is a fundamental problem of the web. How do you take advantage of this incredibly advantageous medium while maintaining privacy? It's a problem that no one really seems to be grappling with - the main issue becomes an issue of trust. How do websites establish the identity of a user to issue levels of trust? The problem becomes even more confounded with the American notion of "privacy" and the general distrust towards any national identification system.

This is one of the problems that I feel most depressed about - a lot of blogging tools have started to tone down on cool feature developments and are trying to monetize their user base [Tabulas included, but this changes soon!]. I haven't seen any new feature developments on Blogger ... or even much on Livejournal. Even Xanga has slowed down feature development to once every few months ... and are there even any new disruptive blogging tools emerging?

Back to the point: privacy controls are NECESSARY

If we take for fact that most users are not interested in joining a blogosphere, but simply in emulating their community of their real-life friends online, the answer becomes clear as to whether privacy controls are required: a resounding yes.

I'm still grappling with the maturity of the blogging community. Both in terms of adoption within the general population and the goals of the bloggers - are we still at the "early adopters" phase of the technology? If we are, what will the demographics of future generations of bloggers resemble?

One of the things I'm very cognizant about is that the bloggers I read and the bloggers I've met are *not* very typical. The bloggers at conference and the weekly meetups seem to be the "elite" of the blogging community - those who are really at the edge of new tools and developments, and are trying to push the blog into new fields.

Even developers seem very disconnected with these bloggers; how disconnected are the developers from the "average joe" blogger? I'll be writing my thoughts on podcasting [new emerging tech], and I wonder how easily adoptable podcasting will be for the average joe user. Really.

So what I think: I think that within the next 5 years, the greatest level of adoption will occur from the professionals demographics - these are the people in their 30s and 40s, looking for a way to connect to social networks outside their work. They will look to take advantage of advanced privacy controls to ensure that what they post cannot be read by prying eyes; this will help build a level of trust between those users and services that will lead to greater adoption rates.

Lots of technologists claim that e-mail is broken [I believe so] and that blogging can serve a lot of the needs of e-mail, and I think this is where the next generation of blogger growth will come from. Grandma and Grandpa looking to share their pictures and experiences with a willing audience.

Conclusion

So yes, given the fact that most users on the Internet do not want to use blogs for grassroots journalism or for any real "useful" purpose besides "writing about their lives," privacy levels are absolutely necessary. A lot of people of people wish simply to share with a limited audience, and not to share with absolute strangers. The mentality that Jon's friend shared ['it's my blog and don't you dare read it or comment on it you f*ing asshole'] is mostly the failure of blogging services in allowing the user easy privacy level access - this person brought ideas that seemed reasonable from the real world and tried to apply them to the web - sadly most web tools are still in their infancy and could not handle these requests.

Until web tools learn to deal with these users' very reasonable request for greater privacy control, blogging will continue to only be accessible to a very small subset of users [teenagers with nothing to hide and semi-professional amateur bloggers].

And if you're thinking this is a bad thing [keeping "average Joe" users out of the blogosphere], this is misguided thinking. Technology must be democratized so *every* can use them and benefit from them.