Blogging in decline?

It seems that blogging is in decline. According to the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog thingies in the side bar many people who used to visit this blog no longer do so. Well, that’s probably just because I write boring stuff. But it seems to be happening elsewhere as well.

A while ago there was a bold new attempt to provide links between blogs and the mainstream media in the form of Twingly. This would enable one to see at a glance who had blogged about a particular news item, which was quite useful. I hoped it might grow and spread to more newspapers, but the only one that I knew that adopted it was The Times in South Africa, and even they seem to have dropped it now. Perhaps it’s the worsening economic situation, and The Times and other media are retrenching. But even if that is the case, the fact that links to the blogosphere are the among first to go is significant. Two years ago people were predicting that the mainstream media were in trouble, that blogging was taking over. Now, it seems, the blogosphere is no longer perceived as a threat.

The process is even more advanced in Usenet newsgroups, where participaation has dropped enormously, and what remains is usually just cranks and fanatics. But beven the bloggers are disappearing, or flocking to join the ranks of twitterers.

So the better our tools for communication become, the less we are able to make use of them.