Over at Many-2-Many, danah boyd discusses what may be the central challenge to group blogs' continued existence: they are usually oriented toward a topical focus, like "public relations" or "social software." Some topics, like sex and politics, will never be played out, it seems, while others can be. Coupled with the human tendancy to shift focus, group blogs tend to fall apart.

But, as cousin danah points out, personal blogs are different:

[from Web 2.0 and Many-To-Many]

The thing about a personal blog is that it changes with you because you don’t feel so compelled to stick with a topic (much to the chagrin of some readers).

[...]

Herein lies the problem with all of this… Our lives have started to escape categories. And topical blogs are categories. Hmmm…

I think that the replacement for this is coming. Rather than create topical group blogs, people will simply coallesce around the same (or very similar) tags, which will define a topicspace, a tagspace. Today, we don't actually do much with those spaces: for example, all the posts tagged "PR" at Technorati don't amount to a real destination, like a group blog does, but is just a luanching pad for people to go elsewhere. However, if someone -- like Corante, perhaps -- were to aggregate the writings of people -- like the individual contributors to Many-2-Many, and let's say another leading 100 writers on things related to the huiman use of the Web -- tagspaces would emerge. "Web 2.0" would explode, for example. A company like Corante could direct some editorial digest on what the most interesting pieces are for any day, and that tagspace could become a real meeting point for people interested in the topic. Years later (perhaps) if the topic cools, readers and contributors would wander off, just like people looking for the cool new cafe, or the trendiest nightspot. The individuals would still be blogging, just touching on new topics. To some extent, that's why I shifted this back to a solo project: then I can touch on anything that interests me. I can grow in whatever direction, not hemmed in by the topic of the blog.