There's already been some buzz about community blog portals but this relatively new weblog/blogging category is about to get substantially bigger in the coming months as for-profit and non-profit organizations alike discover the value in BlogPortals that apply a distributed authorship model to connecting with constituents

21Publish, one of the key players in this space, is a premier tool for housing web-based groups such as alumni associations, Small and medium enterprises, universities, groups, boards and communities, along with commercial enterprises. The beauty of 21Publish's new "Collaborative Blogging" software is that it enables organizations to communicate and interact more effectively without the hassle of a complilcated enterprise conent management system or tedious IT involvement in your project. 21Publish is a spin-off of 20six (http://www.20six.co.uk/), a European provider of weblogs, with communities in Germany, Netherlands, France and the UK.

There has already been significant buzz from the supply side of this equation. So, needless to say, the future of enterprise blogging in general is pretty well mapped out, at least for the forseeable future. However, it's up to those of us in the blogosphere to drive the demand side of the equation. Some of which will happen with the continued credibility that bloggers are gaining and the attention now being paid to the medium, but at the end of the day, the rest of the work will be done by those providing solid business use cases for enterprise blogging, BlogPortals, and collabortive blogging.

I don't think the future of blogs is any way tied to the credibility of bloggers in general. The message and the platform are totally separate. The web did just fine and there certainly wasn't a lot of credibility on the WWW in 1997 :) Heck, we had user editable web pages back in 1996. None of this is really revolutionary or rocket science. It's evolutionary with a lot of hype.

Chris,

I mostly agree with you. A recent story about blogs and buzz and faux blogs underscores your point. Bloggers, an admittedy self-serving community at times, are OK with separating the message from the medium (finally!) where buzz blogs, if you will, can be used for marketing purposes without excessive backlash.

Sure, it's evolutionary. The web didn't have a lot of credibility back when I was in it in 1996, but when people started making money, and when most of the F1000 had websites, you couldn't ignore it like you could before.

I see the same, albeit on a smaller scale, happening with blogs. If you did a Venn Diagram of Weblogs, Websites, and the concept of "Message", you'd get a lot of overlap. However, I believe that you'd still have some space where websites and weblogs are evolving seperately.