2006 to be an interesting year for blogging

If 2004 was the year that political blogging exploded, and 2005 was the year when the blogosphere really began to gell and mature, I think 2006 will be the year that the blogosphere starts to shake out a little bit. I'm noticing that the typical right v. left split in the blogosphere is still there, but especially on the right things are beginning to fracture a little bit. I think the Hillary Miers debate was the start of it. It was the first time that the right side of the blogosphere really split hard on an issue. It redefined relationships some bloggers had with each other. It was followed up by some more blog geek issues such as "link whoring" and open trackbacks to manipulate the TTLB ranking system and also OSM/Pajama's Media. While I'm not entirely sure how things are going to shake out, there is a certain clique-ishness that is developing and fragmenting what had been a fairly unified entity, and I think that will result in blog environment that is going look quite different a year from now.