Instapundit on BlogNashville

Glenn Reynolds at TechCentralStation has this assessment of where we are in the blogging world today:

Are blogs busting loose?

Last weekend I attended the BlogNashville blogger conference, held at Belmont University in Nashville. It was the third conference of that sort I had attended, and it underscored the way blogs, and blogging, are changing.

In 2002, I went to Yale's Revenge of the Blog conference. In 2003, I attended Harvard's Bloggercon I. The atmosphere at this one was different.

At those earlier conferences, everyone was still focused on the newness of blogs, and on the amateur spirit, and political emphasis, that marked blogging at that point. Now blogs aren't quite as new, and though there's still plenty of politics and amateurism, people are now talking about making money.

In fact, the two recurring themes of this latest conference were making money, and video. ...

There are a lot of videobloggers now, and this conference featured a lot more video being shown, and taken. There was a crew of documentary filmmakers making a movie on blogging, but they were outnumbered several-to-one by amateurs capturing video for live streams or for posting. Many, many bloggers are incorporating video interviews and reporting into their work, and I think that within a year or so we'll see videobloggers beginning to compete with television news operations -- especially local television news operations -- in quite a few places. ...

I think he's right. Video and audio will have central seats in the personal media revolution.