“I think that blogging is about to leave the province of visionaries (early adopters) and become the subject of intense evaluation by the early majority who need to use blogging to break through the increasing consumer resistance to corporate flackery.” –David St Lawrence
I like the title for your post!
It has occurred to me that blogging is not one thing, by any means, so blogs will be crossing the (business),(journalism), and (publishing) chasms as separate segments.
You could picture the advance of bloggers into any area much like the advance of a horde of army ants. Individually insignificant, perhaps only annoying, but irresistable as a mass. Each with its own agenda, but joined by a general guiding purpose into a force that sends messages far beyond the boundaries of the blogosphere.
The actual model may be very close to the bowling alley model put forth by Geoffrey Moore. Blogs may have already penetrated many tiny areas without setting off too many alarms. At some point in the near future, early majority players will see that they are virtually surrounded by competitors who are deriving benefits from these blogging things.
That does not persuade the early majority to employ blogs. It is the realization that their existing business practices are broken because they cannot compete in handling customer feedback without blogs.
When majority companies learn to use blogs to manage customer relationships and feedback and make money doing so, other companies in the early majority will smoothly become blog proficient.
I do not think it will be blogging as we now know it, it will be just one of the many mutations that will occur in this distributed publishing phenomenon.