When two great buddhointegroblogospheric sites each, independently, comment in terms of blogging being a bygone exercise -- disappearing like glaciers, Republicans and 401(k) balances -- you know we're being informed of a threat to the worldwide web, that it's a global warning.
Cliff Jones of This is This writes, "It is dead. It died on the blog. With its browsers 'round its ankles."
Cliff cites a post in the BBC News blog of Rory Cellan-Jones, where we are told, "I do think that there is evidence that early adopters from the tech crowd have moved on, perhaps disappointed that their blogs are not reaching a mass audience - or discovering that it's easier to have a conversation in a smaller space, where the madding crowd doesn't keep butting in."
Where elsewhere are bloggers off to? Wired Magazine says, "Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. You'll find [Robert] Scoble [of Scobleizer blog and Scoble on Twitter], [Jason] Calacanis [of calacanis.com], and most of their buddies from the golden age [of blogging] there. They claim it's because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.
~C4Chaos [pictured on flickr, under the flow of a melting glacier, above] of the (hyper)stream ~C4Chaos [and still, reluctantly, of the infrequently-posting blog ~C4Chaos] tells us, in his blog, after a ten-day posting lapse, "Long-time visitors would have noticed by now that I no longer blog every day like I used to. Not to worry. I haven’t given up blogging. I’m actually more active now than I was before. Here’s why: Life is But a Stream, Why I Do Less Blogging and More (hyper)streaming."
What do we find on ~C4's site's (hyper)stream tab? Twitter and Friendfeed posts, on & on like there's no tomorrow.
There may be a flicker of hope, though. Cliff, "reporting from the twitching corpse," tells us in a follow-up blog entry, "Actually, reports of the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated. It’s interesting to read about this in newspapers, too. It’s like horses talking about the demise of cars. Things co-exist. Horses are still around. And like newspapers they are more for fun than function, they make a lot of mess and French people eat them."
Whew! That was close. I figure anything French people eat will be around for a long time. Do frogs still have legs? Why, sure they do. Mmmm, tastes like chicken.* Do blogs still have legs? Hell, yes. They talk the talk and they can still walk the walk.
* Or, tofo chicken for non-carnivores.
10/27/08 Update: In his comment to this post, C4Chaos tells us that behind him in the pic we do not see melted glacier water. [I knew that; I am teasing.] And that his hyperstream includes Twitter and Friendfeed posts, not Twitter and Facebook, as I had written. I've changed my post text in light of C4's correction re the hyperstream but not the water stream.
