Remember when "desktop publishing" was delivered? There was an unbelievable outpouring of bad design, and the professional community grumbled. Just because everyone CAN design and publish doesn't mean they should... then there was "printing on demand", desktop video, YouTube... these are all technologies that lower the barrier-to-entry for the production and distribution of content. It's not that everyone can do it, but if you are suitably motivated, in general, nothing is stopping you. Authors are no longer subjected to the whims of capricious corporate publishers; filmmakers don't need to woo a studio, and so on. I'm a big fan of these changes.
Blogging is a further step down this path: You want to write? You have something to say? Now anyone can open up a little storefront and put their writings out there for the public to consume. Or not. And just as when desktop publishing arrived, there are countless examples of people who probably should not blog. They may have little to say or bland insights. Luckily, the natural ecology of the web buries their content - no harm, no foul.
I had a radio show in college; i'd get up at dawn and go down to WBRU-AM and broadcast and banter to, I believe, no one. It didn't matter. For me it was about the process. Blogging is about the same. If you walk into a bookstore today you'll see a ton of books -- who is reading all these books? Most seem utterly forgettable, and yet, these are the successful authors - the people who made it through every filter thrown at them and still managed not only to get published, but to land in a national bookstore chain. Trust me, that's a lot of obstacles surpassed. For every book in the store, there are hundreds or thousands that didn't make it. In many cases, these are what blogs have become: unpublished books.
Twitter is the bleeding edge of this phenomenon. Now it's even EASIER to have something to say and broadcast it to your followers. Like blogging, like desktop publishing, it just gets easier and easier to stand on your soapbox and hope for an audience. Maybe the speaker doesn't care much if no one is listening (like me at WBRU), and perhaps most of the people speaking really have nothing to say ("I had eggs for breakfast! Another beautiful day!") but the ability of anyone to shout simply gets easier all the time.
So everyone is talking and shouting, even. But few are listening. I'd suggest that all these technologies -- desktop publishing, YouTube, blogging, Twitter -- are utterly liberating and fantastic for those who are already broadcasters of sorts, people with niche audiences (small or large), who have something to say and have created a channel. Grandpa can broadcast wisdoms to his dispursed family. Scoble can critique technologies to the geek crowd. Gaga can engage her fans in her daily tribulations and political agenda. The system is self-filtering. Anyone can step up to the mike, and maybe you get an audience and maybe you don't.
The real problem that every production medium has to face is how to find your audience. It's true for book publishers and website developers. A publishing company needs maybe 10,000 book readers to break even on making a book; and 50,000 might make it a best seller. A website might need 1 million users every month to pay for development and operations. By leveling the playing field in terms of access to production tools and distribution channels, everyone from grandma to Foursquare has to figure out how to get people to come to their product. It's still the hardest and most expensive part of the process.
