The Last Podcast

Just noticed that Robert Scoble thinks that audience size doesn’t matter. Instead, he says advertisers care more about the quality of the audience:

In the past few years I’ve had some success building audiences, but I found that that’s not really what’s important. It’s not what advertisers REALLY care about.

Now, there are varying opinions about this. Allen Stern goes into great detail in his rebuttal and Hugh McLeod seems to agree with Scoble (though I think he is writing from the ‘Dave Winer’ perspective, where blogging itself doesn’t make you money, but where the money comes to you because of blogging - see his last paragraph for that).

I think, however, that the most important item Scoble points to is hidden at the end of his post:

How can we take our art further?

How come bloggers never obsess about THAT?

That does hit a nerve with me. What, indeed, can we do to further our art (or craft, as I would call it). What are the next steps we can take to make blogging more interesting for our readers/friends?

I think the next movement will come in the form of a tighter integration of lots of different services that are just now budding. Blogging will be mashed up more tightly with Twitter, video (in the form of Seesmic, qik etc.), social networks and whatever else we come up with next. Putting these feeds together is the next big challenge in blogging, I think.

Bloggers who only blog and don’t twitter, broadcast live video and maybe do a podcast or two might soon be a thing of the past.