"Say Everything" author Scott Rosenberg. (Stephen Brashear/PSBJ)

Scott Rosenberg, journalist, author and co-founder of Salon.com, documents the rise of blogs in his new book, “Say Everything.” The book profiles the people and sites that fueled the blogging phenomenon, and explores the future of blogs amid the rise of Twitter and other social networking services. He spoke with TechFlash during a recent visit to Seattle. Read on for edited excerpts.

Q: Why write a book about blogs?

Rosenberg: I realized that there was a story with a real narrative. I had followed it all as it happened, but there were holes in my understanding and in my knowledge. People say, that’s ironic, you’re doing a book about blogs – why don’t you just do a blog? The form of a book gives you the opportunity and the impetus to find a big story and to fill in those blanks. I thought blogging was important enough and it was time to do it.

Q: What have blogs meant in the evolution of the Internet?

Rosenberg: I identify blogging as the first mass experience of having a read-write web or a two-way web or a user-generated web – all these terms mean the same thing. They mean a web that we create ourselves. 1994, 1995 was when people first saw browsers and got excited, and it took a good five, seven, eight years from that point for blogs to show people, this is what that vision is about – this is what it looks like when anyone can contribute.

Q: To what extent are blogs still relevant in an era of Facebook and Twitter and the real-time web?

Rosenberg: I think that they’re hugely relevant. We have this notion that each new media form that comes along kills off its predecessors, and they almost never do. TV didn’t kill off movies. Radio we still have. Similarly, the idea that Facebook and Twitter will kill blogging, I think is ridiculous. Each new form does redefine the ones that precede it. What’s happening with blogging is the casual, one-line blog post that some bloggers used to enjoy as part of their output, you’re going to see a lot less of that, because it’s easier to do that on a network or on Twitter.

Q: I love that you bring up Romenesko’s MediaNews as an example in the book, because many journalists were actually reading a blog before they knew what a blog was. Why didn’t journalists pick up on this phenomenon more quickly?

Rosenberg: Part of it was having a mentality where we thought we already knew how to do things. But the other piece of it, which applies to the Romenesko example, was that they looked at Romenesko and they said, well, he’s not doing anything original. He’s just aggregating. And that aggregation function is kind of a low-status thing in the newsroom. And I understand that. It’s more exciting to take on a big story, put your byline on it, than to pull together lots of stuff from other people. But media businesses have always been aggregators, too. When a newspaper takes AP copy, that’s what it’s doing. I think it just took media professionals a while to accept that aggregation on the web is hugely important and we shouldn’t look down our noses at it.

Q: What makes a good blog in 2009?

Rosenberg: If you have an ambition for your blog to actually reach a significant number of readers, if you’re trying to make a name for yourself, the bar is much higher today. There’s more people doing it, there’s more competition, so you have to post more, you have to know more, you have to know more people. When blogging started, it was sort of a greenfield opportunity. It was empty space, and people who were doing it early on found it pretty easy to draw a crowd. Have a passion for whatever you’re writing about. The other thing is to have a distinct voice of some kind, and it better be true to who you are.

Q: What will blogs be like in, say, 2015?

Blogs themselves are actually a pretty mature form now. I don’t see that itself changing that much. The form has found all the key things it needs to be what it is. But the ways that people have of finding individual posts, of deciding what to read, of deciding what to share, those have been evolving steadily, and the mutations are coming faster now. Google started pointing people to blogs early on. Then we had Digg come along and this sort of social news discovery idea. Today people tell me they’re giving up their RSS readers and following links that people send them on Twitter. That’s just going to keep changing faster and faster, I think ultimately probably better and better, more efficient, because that’s the kind of thing where you can turn the power of algorithms on.