David Weinberger - "When blogs get really popular": While there are a hell of a lot of blogs and blog readers, blogs aren't even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It'll happen.

I also disagree.

When blogs get really popular they will be properly called websites again - personal homepages probably. Blogs only got traction because the toolmakers failed to design something that the average smarty-pants could use. Now, we have a bunch of blogging tools that cater to smarty-pants but completely fail to provide real-value to people like my mom (who really could take advantage of a lot of features that the blogging world has to offer).

Blogging is really nothing more than an out-of-band innovation that moves personal home pages from being exclusively unidirectional to being optionally bidirectional. When blogging becomes really popular, all of this will be completely obvious - looking back on it. Let's take some baby steps first though - let's stop thinking about blogging tools as blogging tools and start thinking of them as client applications. Along with that, let's also start thinking of these client apps as multi-point to multi-point in their construction.

Of course, this doesn't mean that David's vision of the future won't come to pass, but rather that it will be the website world that makes it happen.

(PS - I need to verify this with a little bit more thinking, but I think that Dave's thinking that "the distinction between the big, high-traffic blogs and the rest of the world of blogging will be increasingly sharply etched. " is the result of a temporary aberration in the blogosphere created by the clue-train bloggers and the core evangelists. If we net them and their incredibly successful outreach out of the equation as being "exceptional" instead of "normative", then we're left with a much more even distribution of traffic centering around much more localized microclusters of bloggers that closely identify with one another. In other words, my wife and her growing circle of bloggers have no idea who the A-List is - yet they've created their own. If the evolution of their blogging cluster follows prior trends, they will become their own A-list. Similarly, LJ drama rarely intersects with "SV intelleblogs" - two different communities here, each with their own standards and hero's. But back to the point - big, high-traffic blogs will become less common as more of these communities have a chance to evolve. Besides, absolute traffic volume is the wrong way to measure the value of blogs. The only real way to measure the value of a blog is to examine the utility that it brings to its owner. Can you imagine measuring the value of your email client based on how many people sent you email?)