To be sure, I am going to miss blogging. I am going to miss the relationships with my fellow bloggers. I am going to miss the readers. I am going to miss the great friends that I have made over this time. I am going to miss all the good times that we have had together. But most of all, I am going to miss the comments.*
I unsubbed from most of Jason’s feeds because there was too much spam for his various properties.
Dave Winer said he’d stop blogging a while back and I’m in the same mood with this announcement.
Big deal. Just stop. There doesn’t need to be a song and dance about it, there doesn’t need to be a ‘retirement party’. As more and more of the A-list move to not blog or rely on soundbite feeds (like Friendfeed, ident.ca and whatever the flavour of the month is), we’re going to see less and less content from them. I’ve commented on this several times in relation to Robert Scoble’s blog – since he started jumping from service to service and seems to be more concerned with building his ‘followers’, there’s been a lot less content on his main blog. Is he retiring too or is this the natural order of things.
A few month ago, Jason and Robert were squabbling about who could get the most followers. It became cool to hoard followers like rare baseball cards and to plead for more, just a few more, to reach some arbitrarily determined level. Now, suddenly it’s not cool to have thousands of people trying to talk to you (or more relevantly, when twenty thousand people realise they’ve been ignored, it ain’t pretty).
What’s Jason doing? He’s moving to an email list and restricting the membership to 750. Man – something old is new again. If you really want to get back to your roots, get below the Dunbar Number in the number of people you interact with. Yup, knock it down to 150.
There’s a real opportunity for New Media Amateurs to gain some ground by providing the content that is missing. More and more, my feeds are becoming advertising or reviews as the old guard simply run out of steam. More and more established blogs are putting out less and less (as evidenced by the feeds I consume which used to get a backlog of a thousand posts if left for a week. These days it would take 3 weeks to get to that level.