Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.

There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.

To change the blog to a full-text feed, go to Settings and select "Full."

To make comments embeddable, go to Settings > Posts and comments. Select the "Embedded" option.

Users who have already replaced their Blogger profiles with their Google+ profiles can share snippets of Blogger blog posts to their Google+ circles.

For bloggers who already have a good following on Google+, integrating the two makes a lot of sense. But for anyone who blogs on Blogger under a pseudonym, linking Google+ and Blogger closes the opportunity for that fake Internet profile. Threaded comments are available for users regardless of whether or not they integrate their Google+ and Blogger profiles.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Web 3.0: The Age of Expertise

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

Reading was the first thing that had to change before the business of Web publishing could change. Hardware, specifically smartphones and tablets, set the ball rolling. The tablet form factor has been on our minds for a while, but it wasn't until the iPad's capacitive touchscreen that tablets took off with consumers.

BBC.com conducted an interesting study of tablet users this year, which showed that the hands-on interface provides users with a sense of control. That's the key to making engaging tablet content.

Ten-inch tablets are a fine way to view a website, but new kinds of interfaces can better take advantage of the touchscreen (and lack of physical keyboard). That's why software companies have gotten out ahead of publishers in providing reading apps that can turn any content into tablet content.

Flipboard is a celebrated example, and it also just launched an iPhone version. It can pull any Web content into its pleasant, touch-controlled layout, and it also offers publishers enhanced options for Flipboard-optimized content. Many other Web companies have aped this model, the latest of which is Google. None of these apps has emerged as the answer, but the new Google Currents has some interesting advantages for publishers.

The other vision of tablet reading is the "content-shifting" model, best exemplified by Instapaper. Instead of simply viewing Web content through a new layout, Instapaper saves clean versions of Web pages on demand. When you click the Instapaper bookmarklet on an article, that article is synced to your Instapaper in a cleaned-up version containing only plain text and embedded media.

Unlike Flipboard and the like, there's no value-add for publishers here. Rather, Instapaper is, in a way, a competitor. If publishers want to make money off the content they host themselves, they have to make their own reading experience that's better.

New Ways of Writing

To match this new way of reading, publishers have to be bold. The iPad and the Kindle Fire both offer newsstands for publication apps, inviting media organizations to make in-depth tablet experiences, not just paperless magazines.

One of the best examples we've seen so far is The Guardian iPad Edition, which launched the same day as Apple's iOS 5 Newsstand. It sneaks the Web view in here and there, and it streams in some content, but much of the experience is native, giving the reader that sense of control that matters so much on the tablet.

But the new rules in publishing are empowering independent content creators, too. Social media have created a new class of publishing, in which content created by everyone gets stitched together into a narrative. But Storify has blurred the line again, turning social media into a full-fledged sense-making platform that can power a news site more like the ones we're used to.

The do-it-yourself publishing platforms have also become more powerful. It's a great time to be a WordPress publisher, because it's creating revenue streams for independent content creators and developers alike. And then there are next-generation tools like Jux, which has blown the notion of the blog wide open. Now anyone can make an eye-popping, full-screen, multimedia periodical that's fully touch-enabled and reformats to fit the desktop, the tablet or the smartphone as needed.

New Ways of Advertising

New publishing tools are great, but what publishing really needs is new business models. Yes, some legacy media companies are beginning to see real revenue from digital content, but the fact is that Web users have gotten comfortable with content being free. That means more ads.

Fortunately, things are looking up on that front, too. For one thing, thanks to WordPress and its partnership with Federated Media, ad revenue streams are now available to independent bloggers, not just mainstream sites. But there is also a whole new kind of advertisement on the horizon, one that takes advantage of the new hardware and the touchscreen sense of control. As devices get increasingly powerful, the limits on Web publishing fall away.

Disclosure: Federated Media is also RWW's advertising partner.

First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.

What The Heck's A Dropbox?

If you don't have a Dropbox account, you'll want one. Think of Dropbox as a folder on your computer that syncs to the cloud. Our editor-in-chief, Richard MacManus, just wrote a great tutorial about cloud storage services that will teach you all the reasons you'd want Dropbox or something like it.

As you'll see in that post, there are several choices, but I recommend Dropbox, especially if you want to use Calepin. You can use Dropbox.com to manage it from the Web, but it's also a free desktop application that lets you treat it just like a normal folder on your computer that syncs automatically. You get 2GB of space for free, and that's plenty for a blog.

Ready to sign up now? I did refer you, so you could consider signing up through my referral link (winky face), so I can get a little more space in mine. If you don't want to indulge me, just go to Dropbox.com to sign up.

Markdown? That sounds scary.

I promise Markdown isn't scary. It's an easy, human-readable way to format text for the Web. Daring Fireball's John Gruber invented it. For our purposes here, all you need to know about it is that it's much cleaner and easier than HTML. But it's important to know that Markdown understands HTML. If you forget how to do something in Markdown, you can always do it the old-fashioned HTML way. Here's an example of what Markdown looks like:

To write:

Hello, there! This is an introduction to Markdown. It's really easy to use, and I promise you'll LOVE it!

This is all you need:

**Hello, there!** This is an introduction to [Markdown][1]. It's *really* easy to use, and I promise you'll ***LOVE*** it!

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Isn't that nice and easy to read? It's also really powerful; you can do pretty much anything you'd need HTML to do, and Calepin will turn it into Web-ready HTML without you having to worry about it. You can learn everything you need to know in Daring Fireball's Markdown tutorial. I write all my RWW posts in Markdown, and I write faster, less stressfully and with fewer errors than I ever had in HTML before.

Now Put Them All Together!

To post to your Calepin blog, you just write up your post using any plain text editor you want and save it as a .md file in the Calepin folder in your Dropbox. Want to use images? No problem. You can at least insert an image using Markdown, or you can just use HTML if you need more control over it. You can host the image on a free service like Imgur, or you can even put it in your Dropbox public folder. Either way, just grab the URL and put it in your blog post. Then log in to Calepin.co and click the big 'Publish' button, and your posts will go right up on the Web.

That's it! You've got a blog. Mine's jonm.calepin.co. What's yours?

Calepin is powered by Pelican, an anagram of "Calepin" that is also an open-source weblog generator written in Python. If you're interested, you can view or fork the source code on Github. Future features include a few themes, as well as respect for a /theme folder for your own, and custom domains.

Oceans of thanks to Merlin Mann, the Internet wizard who turned me onto Calepin. He recently made fun of me on this podcast. Back To Work is a show that will teach you about writing, the Internet and getting better at stuff. I listen every week, and you should too.

"Everything we're doing is about increasing engagement on publisher content," says Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. By drawing in conversations from where they're happening on the social Web, Livefyre sites will become the hubs of conversation about their own content again. People who prefer to chat on social networks can still be involved, but sites will still benefit from those conversations on their own pages. Twitter and Facebook are built in at launch, and Google Plus is coming soon.

The most important SocialSync feature for publishers is the automatic capturing of related comments on outside networks. When anyone shares or talks about an article on Facebook or Twitter, the comment thread on the article itself will automatically grab that comment and pull it in.

Twitter conversations are particularly hard to capture. Not only do they fly by in real time, they're scattered and incomplete. Many sites, ourselves included, love to use Storify to curate tweets manually, but the torrent of tweets can be too much to manage sometimes. Livefyre's new features can reduce that burden by grabbing related tweets automatically.

Facebook and Google Plus - which Kretchmer says is coming to Livefyre soon - are great for threaded conversations, but for that very reason, important conversations happen on those networks totally outside the confines of the original site. Those conversations represent huge value for publishers, and SocialSync will help sites that use Livefyre recapture it.

Kretchmer says the Livefyre database tracks the different sources of the comments underneath. To simplify the interface, Livefyre displays only one total number of comments. For comment threads themselves, publishers have a choice: they can separate out Twitter and Facebook comments from the on-page blog comments, or they can have one unified stream with just a small indicator of a comment's source.

The overall design of the commenting system can be styled to the publisher site. Kretchmer also says the system works "perfectly" on mobile sites. Real-time comment streaming, sign-in and sign-up through Livefyre or other social networks, and all its other desktop features work fine on mobile as well.

SocialSync is good for content strategy, because it will make the article page a more definitive location for users and search engines alike. But it's also good for community. It will take away that lonely feeling of coming to a blog post and seeing 0 comments. Kretchmer says that Livefyre helps publishers vastly increase the volume of comments and shares, creating valuable engagement between readers and staff, as well as driving traffic and increasing relevance to search.

Comments Are Part of the Story

Social networks have tried to provide this service themselves. Facebook offers a third-party commenting system, but it's not gaining much traction, and Twitter offers a range of resources to add value to publisher sites. But commenting services like Disqus - which we use here at RWW - and Livefyre let sites and their users use whatever channels they want for their conversations. Livefyre 2.0 and SocialSync will be great for publishers who want conversations to flourish without getting away from the stories that start them.

What makes a good comment thread? Start one here, and let's discuss!

In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.

WordPress is a little late to the following party. Though the platform is doing great for publishers and developers, Tumblr, which is built on a following model, is reeling in much more traffic. The new Posterous refresh is also centered around this model, and its new iPhone app emphasizes following and reading the same way today's WordPress for Android update does. Even Facebook has given in to the following model. Don't say "I told you so," Twitter.

Other recent WordPress updates focus on increasing reader engagement as well. The comments panel has been improved to keep track of the regulars, and easy, secure access to the WordPress API has enabled new third-party applications that go beyond simple plug-ins.

How do you like to follow your favorite publishers? RSS? Twitter? Or inside your own platform like Tumblr, Posterous or WordPress? Let us know in the comments.

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

Screenshot comes from Fred Wilson's AVC blog

The Posterous iPhone app has been updated to incorporate spaces, but the announcement doesn't mention the Android app. Posterous has also improved ways of finding and following spaces, adding a 'Popular' tab for real-time highlights from around Posterous and an 'Activity' tab showing likes, comments, follows and such from your spaces and those you follow.

Posterous Reborn

We used to think of Posterous as a light blogging service, and it wasn't clear how it distinguished itself from its competitors. Sure, it had nifty little features like custom domains and built-in Markdown support, but these weren't features for everyday users. Tumblr, the clearest competitor, began to leave Posterous in the dust. But after today's left turn, it's not even clear Posterous and Tumblr are in the same game anymore.

So, why share to your social circles using Posterous instead of Facebook or Google Plus? Well, does Facebook or Plus let you choose your own theme for each friend list or circle? Posterous does. Can each Facebook friend list or Google Plus circle have its own custom Web address? Not without more trouble than it's worth. Posterous has issued a challenge to the "silo" model. It lets you share the right stuff with the right people in the way that suits you best.

Posterous Users, Rest Assured

In the announcement, the change is described as a "brand new service for the Web, iPhone and Android that replaces the current service." That sounds drastic, and existing users could be forgiven for feeling a bit unnerved, but as it turns out, existing Posterous sites will survive the transition to Spaces just fine.

Clearly, while we've all been watching all the big Tumblr and WordPress news, the Posterous team has been busy in the kitchen.

What Exactly Is Blogging, Anyway?

WordPress and Tumblr are showing great usage numbers, and maybe that's why their competitors are moving to distinguish themselves. Blogger, Google's popular blogging platform, may be rolled into Google Plus in some way, and Google's social network is itself a fairly compelling publishing platform for medium-length posts. New startups like Jux are taking what might be called a "maximalist" approach to blogging, turning it into a bombastic, full-screen experience. Posterous, for its part, seems to be hanging onto its focus on simplicity and usability.

Which publishing tools do you like best? Let's discuss in the comments.

The app doesn't offer a full-fledged blog post editor, but instead it offers simple photo uploading, tagging and location services, concentrating on features that complement mobile blogging. Its features are comparable to the Android app, which went live in February. The previous iPhone client for Blogger was built by a third party.

Which free blogging platform do you prefer and why? Let us know in the comments.

The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there's currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free "Social Stock Market" game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.

The new apps can make WordPress blogs more shareable, but the updated Comments panel adds better social dynamics at a more basic level. Comments are the lifeblood of engagement on a blog, and the new tools will help WordPress authors keep better track of their most engaged readers. Last month, WordPress enabled automated sharing of posts to Facebook pages, which is another way to increase engagement, but as we've found at ReadWriteWeb, automated posting doesn't produce great results. Better comment management could help blog authors keep up conversations with a more authentic voice.

WordPress has reported major growth recently. It currently powers nearly 15% of the world's websites and sustains a thriving community of self-employed developers.

Have you used WordPress? Are you a WordPress developer? Tell us about it in the comments.

Mullenweg's address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today's minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress' user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators. But this year, WordPress conducted its first user and developer survey, receiving over 18,000 responses, and it found a thriving economy for developers and site administrators as well.

In keeping with its open-source mentality, WordPress has made the survey data available here for anyone to root through. Mullenweg shares more about current and future developments at WordPress in the full 30-minute address, which you can watch here:

Have you used WordPress? Are you a WordPress developer? Tell us about it in the comments.

Back when I was growing up in corporate America, we were coming off the mainframe era where most of the communications were encapsulated inside manila inter-office memos. That was mostly asynch - you received the memo and acted accordingly. Then came DISSOS and PROFS and the ability to email someone, and we quickly made the transition to more synchronous times. No more waiting, or so it seemed. It took a good ten years or so before email became the lifeblood of corporate communications, and this was before the Internet really took off in the middle 1990s, when dot coms could be purchased by anyone with a credit card.

But IMs are so five-minutes-ago, and now we live in the age of social networking. Last week, our staff got onboard Google Plus, which is a better mousetrap than Facebook, or something like that. But it is completely asynch: you post something to your "stream" or to your "circle" of friends. Like Twitter, you "follow" people that you want to track their activities or bon mots or ideas of the moment. To get the best use out of any of these services, you want to set up different groupings of your contacts for different purposes. Just like there is that loudmouth in your office that always hangs out by the water cooler (Do offices even have water coolers anymore? Do we even work in offices anymore? Nevermind.) that you routinely ignore, you want to defriend or defollow the electronic equivalent on your networks.

The "aha" moment for me with Google Plus is that now I have an opportunity to construct my social graph from scratch, making the circles match my actual behavior, rather than just lumping everyone together under "friend." It is my chance to truly turn my communications into an effective asynch tool. And like our boss, I am less enamored with Google Plus and pine for those simpler days; the only difference is I, being somewhat older, wish to return to the safety of my email inbox, rather than the blog.

In other words, just because someone is my friend doesn't mean I am theirs, and vice-versa. And with Google Plus, we have an opportunity - if we want to take the time - to really understand the nature of our networks and segregate our contacts to take advantage of this disparity.

But here is the rub: serendipity accounts for a lot in my online life. Being a journalist, I try to connect to a lot of people and collect a lot of information. My Facebook account is a mess: I know there are people there that I have never met and never corresponded with or otherwise interacted. Yet I want to "friend" them because I value their opinion and sometimes see their updates in my feed that stimulate something for me personally or professionally.

When many of us older folks first got on Facebook et al. we were obsessed with the junior high (do they even call it that anymore?) mentality of pushing our numbers up - no one wanted to be sitting at the table of misfits in the back of the cafeteria, the people with no other friends. Well, I was one of those dorks back then, and could never aspire to be the cool kid in black with piercings everywhere that has 5,000 Facebook friends these days. Even though being a nerd is suddenly somewhat cool, or at least cooler. (An interesting review of Alexandra Robbins' book The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth can be found talking about this experience in the New York Times.)

Does this mean that the pendulum has swung as far over in the asynch side as possible? I think few of us will take the time to elegantly structure our social networks in Google Plus, but maybe not. And now we have so many mechanisms to communicate that it is hard sometimes to keep track - do I DM, IM, Face-M, post a comment, write a counter-riposte (as I am doing here), cross-post, StumbleUpon, or just send a simple email? You got me.

[N.B. The image is from the Tracy/Hepburn movie The Desk Set, which was made in 1957 and features the two stars who are conflicted about the computerization of a TV station's research department. Of course, the computer depicted was the size of a room.]

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

Instapaper stores stripped-down copies of articles you select from the web, but offline on your device so you can read without connectivity. With the latest version of the app launched a few months ago, you can designate an article for sharing out on Twitter or Facebook once you get back online later. Today WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked Instapaper founder Marco Arment to enable posting to a WordPress blog from inside Instapaper. "I'll make it happen," was Arment's response. Cool!

WordPress's Mullenweg says that his team is working on API changes that will make this sort of integration even easier. That makes me wonder where else we'll see WordPress integration in the future. Blogging may not seem as hip as it used to in these days of Facebook and Twitter but (and I'm totally blogging this, right now) it's still got a unique power and place in the social web. It always will - and that unique phenomenon that is blogging will likely continue to find new places to manifest itself throughout the larger technology universe. Instapaper looks like a great one of those places to me.

Heather Armstrong is celebrating the 10th anniversary of her trailblazing blog Dooce this week and there aren't very many people who can claim that kind of longevity online. It's a new media world and Armstrong is on the short list of people who have advanced that sea change the most. She's spent the last decade opening up possibilities for self-expression that the rest of us are just the beginning to take advantage of.

I spoke with her last week by phone about how blogging has changed, about Facebook and about what she's learned from the last decade of leadership in online self publishing.

Armstrong made a very personal post on her blog yesterday about its 10th anniversary. The post has received more than 4,600 comments. The following are excerpts of what she said to me by phone.

On what it felt like to start blogging:

"I'd made websites for other people for years and I knew what it was like to launch them. I felt like even though a couple dozen people were going to read it, like I was publishing my own little home made magazine. I was talking about music, and television and dating. I remember feeling invigorated by it, writing and designing it. I sent it to 12 friends and said if you guys want to keep up with me, this is how you can.

"Facebook wasn't around when I launched my site. I'm kind of glad it wasn't or else I wouldn't be where I am today."

"Blogger.com was around but I decided to manually code everything and FTP things up to Earthlink. I hand-coded everything through 2002, when my husband installed Movable Type. When you have entries that say Previous and Next, I would manually upgrade all those links after each post. It was ridiculous. I resisted the content management systems because I liked to have the ability to control it."

On becoming a professional blogger:

"[I started just in order] to exercise the writing part of my brain. I was in Photoshop all day long but I didn't do much writing. I never expected it to 1, last this long or 2, for it to become my job.

"When I got fired for my website in 2002 and the traffic went crazy and then the infamy hit, I was sort of jolted out of any comfort that I had in remaining in this little bubble of friends. It was then that I was like, whoa, there are a lot of people out there reading, even as small as it was.

"It wasn't until after my husband had looked at our numbers and we had been approached by a couple of advertising networks, that we saw we could make as much money [running ads on the blog] as he made as a creative director.

"I did it for four and a half years until I made a dime out of it, just out of love for my audience."

Armstrong says that deciding to put ads on her blog was controversial.

"Then the commerce part came around and the conversations started about are you a sell-out if you are a blogger who takes advertising? That seems laughable now but in 2005 I was one of the first personal bloggers who took advertising. I wasn't sure if it was going to be a big backlash or a small one but thankfully it was small. I don't know if people even know that conversation happened."

On Facebook and its impact on blogging

"Since then, a lot of people don't blog even, they use Facebook. Facebook wasn't around when I launched my site. I'm kind of glad it wasn't or else I wouldn't be where I am today.

"People keep saying that Twitter and Facebook are going to replace blogging. But people use Facebook to keep in touch and people use blogs to tell stories. There are times on Twitter when I find someone and I want to find what else they write, I'm looking around to see if they have a Tumblr or a blog."

On the challenge of blogging:

"It's a lot of work. I think anybody who has started [blogging] and stopped in the last 10 years knows that, many people stopped because it was too much work. Curating and posting 140 characters is a lot easier.

"I think my success has been a combination of several factors: one of the big ones is that I've been around for a long time, I've stuck with it, I've had a lot of life events that made the trajectory interesting. I'm not sure that what I've been doing is easily replicable. My suggestion has always been that you should find an existing community who you would like to have reading your site and hang out with them."

On the future of social media:

"I get asked this a lot and good God I don't know. If you'd asked me 5 years ago if I'd have a best selling book, or would Twitter even exist...the landscape has changed so entirely.

"I still really enjoy doing my website. I'm going to do it as long as it makes me happy and it's worth it. I hope it will be for long time that I'll have enough brain cells to rub some words together and people want to read it. When I started blogging about having a child, the term Mommy Blog didn't exist. Now it's its own industry. We made it OK for us to make money and we made it ok for us to talk about our kids online, to attend conferences. I don't know what else could happen."

The biggest lessons learned:

"I don't know if my children or my website have aged me more, but I'm willing to be that my website has. I know so much more about what it means to be human and how human react to things. About impulses. What the last 10 years has taught me, the main lesson, is to first give someone the benefit of the doubt. To not believe everything I hear. Because so much has been written and said about me that's completely untrue, to live with that, I don't ever want to do that to anyone else. I started out writing about celebrities but I don't criticize anyone on my website any more. I want it to be an uplifting place to be."

In addition to her blog, you can also follow Heather Armstrong on Twitter.