Have you read Lou Quillio's blog? It's very good, even if it's not current.

Here's a link to it posted above as my web-page.

Lou was a great if infrequent blogger but I think that wonderful latter piece about his adult children's toys snapped it for him.

Hi Alan -

The "retraction" metaphor is useful (although I tend to think of retraction as "correction," in my line of work), as I'm struck daily by the number of blogs that have either officially ceased to exist or (more likely) have withered away from neglect.

Hope you're around in a year. And more.

John

Thanks, John. And you, too.<p>But it is an astronomical metaphor we need to use as the blogosphere has presented itself as a separate universe which is now in its blue shift. What I like about that sphere is that it is also a bubble and we know what happens to IT bubbles. But then that is like a market correction, too. Who will be crushed in the implosion? Fortunately no one has really invested in blogs. They haven't have they?<p>Interesting to me is that there will always be bloggers now, just like there are ham radio operators click out the morse code that is floating all about our heads. They are having their fun but also being useful, an amateur warning system and emergency communications loop that no one pays or thanks. Would that blogs were ever to be that useful.

I don't totally buy your blogging doomsday scenarios and furthermore my sense of your verbosity, Al, leads me to think you will still be pecking at your keypad for many years to come. However, this (www.rickmercer.com) surely bolsters your arguments about inanity and ultimate death of the popular concept of the blogosphere.

Perhaps not with a bang but with a whimper but it is a whimper that has been going on for a while. All that will be left will be people like me with mild hypomanic tendencies needing to yak and yak and yak.

Noting a few more going or gone, some with commentary on it.

Another blog goes on hiatus, the amazing <i>Living in Dryden</i>

One of the biggies in Canada, <i>Bound by Gravity</i>, shuts it down.<p>Conversely, Living in Dryden, did not disappear.

but I think that wonderful latter piece about his adult children's toys snapped it for him.

Actually I'm only 46 this year (2007) and my girls are in high school. No snap. Quit cuz I was never a blogger, just a hacker who writes, and could build my own platform to do it on.

Used to be that the only kids with a treehouse had a Dad who could build one. Now a crew comes and does it, builds your treehouse ... or your blog. And that's cool.

The next round's coming from folks like me. We just need to reckon our terms in a mainstream medium, do it our way.

LQ

Hey Lou. That would be good as a new thing is definitely needed given the Myspace, YouTube and Facebook whammies that blogging has taken since I wrote that almost two and a half years ago. And you are just two years older than me.<p>And I should have copied that last post about your children's toys. That was good.