1 – What is the one thing that has most dramatically changed in blogging over the past 5 years?

I’ll start with “everything” and then just tell you a story. Blogging like every other system, at its heart, is generational. With blogging, the generations just move a heck of a lot faster. Those of us who were around when the heavy hitters like Mashable were just starting out got to see something that few individuals are privy to, the birth of a new medium. It’s hard to believe these days, but there was a time when it was sort of uncommon for blogging types to make appearances on CNN.

It’s easy to convince yourself that the blogs we spend all of our time reading, with their fancy parties and fifty daily posts must have sprung into being out of whole cloth at some magical point in the Internet’s past. It never happened, trust me on this one. Even the biggest blogs started off as these adorably small, passionate little enterprises cobbled together out of fairy dust and WordPress plugins with no staff, tiny audiences and dreams that basically amounted to generating enough cash from Adsense to hire on a few more writers. It’s that transformation from obscurity to relevance that anyone who plays in technology needs to understand in order to make sense of this world. It’s that change that I am really lucky to have had the opportunity to see first hand.