Image via CrunchBase, source unknownNothing points out the troubles with blogging as watching audiences slowly slip away to other systems, while blogging is not dead, the time of power house blogs and bloggers is also coming to a close over the next few years as people move on to other social networks that incorporate elements of many diverse opinions and viewpoints.

What we are left with is a diffusion rate, where normal life and on line life find a happy medium, despite the idea that the internet is more important than sex. We are hitting a hard wall between the time that people can spend on line and the time that people have to spend in their real lives. The hard wall exists, as work tries to cut off access to social networks, many of the services we use on line are of dubious quality, no one thing stands out anymore, rather we work in a fractured environment of interests, that are defined by our friends, and the people we follow.

New bloggers have a lot of work to do to break into this new environment, the same environment that newspapers, and in many ways other web sites are also having to break into. The words of our friends and the things they do are more important than randomly surfing Google looking to find new things. New bloggers have to pray that someone big notices them and mentions that people should follow them. On the other hand, new bloggers have to spend time investing in those very same social systems, to build up a following there, that may or may not translate over to their blog.

To be a new blogger, or a new blogger network, the idea then is to get an anchor, or expand the usual offering with a number of guest posts. I have guest posted for many blogs to help them get started because they offered a unique voice or a unique service. Blogs like Cloud Ave and Ask the Admin both serve a unique niche, and guest blogging on them helps add my name to their own efforts. That might also just be the new model to follow along, finding a popular blogger who would be willing to guest write on your blog, or a person with a name in the industry to write an article will help launch a new blog.

The rules have changed slowly over the last six months as social networks have firmly supplanted and nearly replaced the traffic I used to get from Google and other search engines (sorry MSN and Yahoo never amounted to more than 1% of overall traffic in a year). Right now, it is all about the people who visit here from social networks and not the traffic I get from Google. When Friend Feed, Social Median, and Stumbled upon become more important to drive traffic than Google or other search engines, one has to pause and take note.

It is about connections, and it is about the people who think you are worth listening to. New bloggers and new blogging networks need to take that idea and run with it. It is both an investment in time that will hit the hard wall of time you have to blog or otherwise interact with people and get a following. Not that Google is irrelevant, but that as people start doing things differently, and network use changes, new bloggers must pay attention to where their audience is coming from.

Tags: blog, google, friend feed, twitter, digg, stumbledupon, bloggers, network, traffic