Shel Israel has returned from the New Communications Forum believing that blogging is entering a new phase, normalization.

According to Shel,

Blogging started as one of Seth Godin’s Purple Cows. I would still like to write about unique or valuable blogs–blogs that will help others find their way into the blogosphere. I hear about dozens of new blogs every week, but few, if any meet that criteria. I see blogs that are high quality, blogs that are good for the businesses and business topics they are designed to address but very few that are of Purple Cow uniqueness.

In fact, this is a good thing, if you are a blogging evangelist. The blog is starting to become part of the business normal, just as email and the Internet did. Both of these early disruptive innovations are now boring because they are so much of the usual business routine. It was not all that long ago that having a website, or allowing employees to email on company time were highly controversial with legal departments fretting the repercussions just as they do today over blogging.

The blog, it seems to me, is becoming just another brown cow. This again, is a good thing. First comes the excitement, then comes the prolongs inevitable change. This is what is supposed to happen. New things need to normalize if they are to endure if they are to really and truly change corporate communications as our book argues it will.

So, Shel is expanding the focus of Naked Conversations beyond business and blogging to include Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is topically a natural extension of blogging. These companies are forming a “people’s web” where the blog allows an efficient conduit for two-way communications. What’s important here is not the conduit per se, but that it allows the customer to take his or her rightful place at the center of the corporation. As Charlene Li said in her conference keynote, the new technology puts the power at people’s fingertips, instead of into the hands of the corporation.

I got into blogging because of its disruptive promise. Web 2.0 is a natural path that follows the lines of disruption and I’m going to follow down those line.

I’m sure that Shel’s readership and community are eager to follow this path, learning and expanding our own horizons in step with him.