After noting that there are "hundreds of blogospheres" and even more sub-communities of weblog users, Anil Dash of Six Apart looks at "some of the common steps of evolution within a blogging community." The first step, of course, is a long and vociferous debate about "What is blogging?"

Evolution is not always a smooth, fluid process and many of the steps forward actually seem like steps backward at the time. Taking a big-picture view of the development of weblogs, Dash writes:

"Once you see these trends, it becomes much easier to see how there is no one monolithic weblog medium, and that these trends are likely to repeat themselves forever... The other interesting generality about these issues is that they almost all end up not being a big deal. They seem like huge, all-consuming issues of great importance at the time, but they almost always end up being resolved with no clear answer and a vague sense that maybe it wasn't the end of the world after all."