During yesterday's good day to release bad news, one small story was lost in the wave of shockers, doubletakers, and jaw-droppers, the prediction by technology analysts Gartner that the blogging phenomenon was set to level off, then dwindle in the next couple of years. According to the Stamford-based consultancy, 20m people have already stopped updating their blogs, while the 100m expected to keep plugging away represent those who still reckon they have something to say, and still think other people are keen to hear it.

I've no doubt Gartner has spotted a fashionable swing away from blogs as we know them - although I recall when I wrote on mobile telecoms titles, we'd always rely on a wild prediction from Gartner and their ilk to plug a news gap, whether we believed them or not - but because they seem to misunderstand what many blogs are, they're probably missing what's coming next.

Sure, some blogs offer a new and unusual angle on news, sport, sex or another aspect of life; others, though, are more like bottles, adrift on the waves. You're sitting on your island, you have paper and bottles, you feel the need to communicate, even though you know, odds are, no one will talk back, so you scribble away. Blogs are an outlet, and even a dull blog is better than spree killing. But essentially, you're saying, "Here I am; this is me." The claim that all bloggers are egomaniacs is quite true, but it misses the point that ALL humans are egomaniacs. Bloggers are just Neanderthals with broadband. As technology gave us in the west near-universal net access, and PCs that are cheaper than the desks they sit on, so technology will open up new avenues for human expression that may eventually eclipse blogs as we know them.

As a text-based trend, blogs are never going to grab the Big Brother market, for instance, where if ideas require more than five grunts to express fully, they're deemed highbrow, but the window on human life that BB grants, and that has proven so popular, should show us the direction popular involvement with the web will take. Add blogs, YouTube, and video-editing software and you get vlogs - add the mobile internet, however, and something very different takes shape.

3G still hasn't taken off in the UK, and the US is waaaaaaaaaay behind, as is usual in mobile telecoms - but it's coming. An always-on broadband connection, on the move, throws up thousand of possibilities, but one I've been looking at for some time is the slife, or slice of life, video record. Not an after-the-fact, edited and considered diary, but a real-time feed of daily life, streaming from lapel cameras and mikes, via your phone or PDA's 3G connection, up to a web server and then to the world. "Who would watch that?" you cry. Are you kidding? Billions.

Now, my life might only appeal to fans of grumpy old men and perhaps clinical psychologists betting on when I'll blow, but Jade's life ... well, for some reason she appeals to many. Jordan, Madonna, Paris, of course - but it's your ninth-tier celebs who will fuel this, following on from teenage kids who will first bring it to the world's attention.

Here's how I see it working. Every slife has a value, but some are more attention-worthy than others. Fifty grumpy old men probably won't get the fanbase that one cheerleader might, for instance. So a market will develop - pay cash, pay more interesting chunks of your own day, contribute group feeds from your buddies - anything to gain access to those higher-credit lives. Fans will buy monthly subscriptions to higher-prized slifes, amateurs will stream their slifes for free, popular amateur sites will be rewarded for their real time - real-life soap opera with big bucks in advertising revenue - and, slowly but surely, every square inch of urbanised land, every minute of every day, will be criss-crossed by point-streaming recorders of all that they see and all that they do. At school, at work, in the shower, in bed, watching, being watched - a consensual Big Brother state, Orwell's and Endemol's coinciding. The death of privacy, the death, almost as a side-effect, of telly, too.

Of course, it's the stuff of science fiction, but then our 21st century is the stuff of science fiction - the rocketeers of the thirties, depressives of the forties, and amphetamine freaks of the fifties got here before us, and a great many of them got a great deal right. Orwell, of course, if in a rather narrow respect. More acutely than anyone else, Phil Dick wrote of the arms race going on between technology and humanity - of the growing distance between what we could do, and what we could comprehend about what we were doing, of the way minds were twisted by the new situations we were throwing ourselves into. Dick would have viewed an always-on, always-watching, always-being-watched world with mirrored horror and fascination, seeing the up- and down-side, and also its inevitability. Fortunately, we have his psychological guidebooks to the modern age to help us unravel the current day, and anyone who doesn't want to be too shocked by the 2020s had better dive into the better science fiction of the 50s, 60s and 70s asap.

What Dick, Gartner and myself would agree on is that social uptake of technology is a grassroots process; it's essentially a democratic, bottom-up development. Rarely does a technology dropped down from on high find expression in exactly the way its makers intended - SMS is the greatest modern-day example of this, apart from, perhaps, the web itself, even if TBL now reckons he always knew it would change the world. So, if predicting the future is a dodgy business, what we can say for sure is that it's what the masses adopt that will spearhead other technologies, and what the masses seem to like these days is ... each other. Ordinary humans, doing ordinary things - that can't be entirely a bad thing. A world that tracks Jade, over one that reveres Diana?

Regardless, this is the world we have: trivialised, obsessive, glued to other lives, unwilling to break away from the herd, fascinated by the beautiful, the damned, and the beautiful and damned. If you want to make a million, invest in slifes now.

By the way, if you google slife you'll find diddly squat. I invented the entire phenomenon over muesli this morning, but some other bugger will make the millions. What with blogging and that, I just don't have the time ...

Now, Gartner, if you want to know what will be big in the 2030s, I'm open to negotiation.