I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers. They didn't change. The marketing blogs just became a new thing, a separate thing.
I don't think I've ever been confused between the two, despite them both being called blogs.
It's pretty obvious that a personal blog is one thing, and a company blog is another. They're both "weblogs", neither has a greater right to the name.
"I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers"
The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did. The number of terrible blogs are legion.
Everyone has a motivation for the things they do, and a lot of the time the motivation for a blog is professional credibility/development, and for the self-employed, more directly in "leads" and good business.
Neither works out. After your dozen-th time on the front-page of HN you realize it works the same as always -- a lot of passing, casual readers who might find the content exemplary but...eh. There was a time when those people would become regulars because you showed that you make good content, but it's just unnecessary now. Just watch HN and Reddit and if they make something good again, maybe it'll appear there.
> The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did.
Did they? Or do they just make up a decreasing fraction of blogs? I've got 95 blogs in my feed reader. My guess is that I've been subscribed to most of them for more than five years, but still about 80% of them posted within the last year (an arbitrary cut-off point, but I don't think it's fair to call something dead if it only ever showed signs of life a couple times a year in its prime).
The change is the lower signal to noise on Google, Twitter, etc. So discoverability of good blog articles becomes ever tougher given how much crap is out there. This discourages new bloggers...
I don't think I've ever been confused between the two, despite them both being called blogs.
It's pretty obvious that a personal blog is one thing, and a company blog is another. They're both "weblogs", neither has a greater right to the name.