Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.

All true sentiments, of course.  I think the bigger epiphany for me at this stage, however, isn’t how email is declining as a defining medium of the web, but how, for a short time, there was a movement that enabled people to create and participate in an exchange of ideas in the wild.  ”Blogging”, you might call it.  Now, so much activity happens behind closed walls, and even if it isn’t, so much of it is shortened to 140 characters or less, that it isn’t private discourse one should be worried about, its the public one, shouldn’t it?

With the maturing of Google apps out of beta (just a few hours ago), and the announcement of Google’s own online OS just now, one wonders if the pieces are beginning to drop into place with respect to Google carving out its own niche — in earnest, this time — about the future of computing.  Sure, there’s always going to be a place for a desktop OS, just like there’s always going to be a place for desktop applications.  But in terms of The Future, one has to wonder where the proportion of where most people are going to spend there time — and productivity — lies.

I’ve written about the secret data centers and the dark fibre Google’s purchased over the years, and one wonders if this isn’t all part of one big plan that was conceived a long, long, time ago.

Today Google is about search.

Tomorrow … Google may allow others to own “Fun” (?)  and “Social” (Facebook? Twitter?) … but its pushing to own Productivity (of which search is only one part) on these interwebs.  Hopefully it’ll be as profitable as owning Productivity has been for Microsoft all of these years.

Granted, I have not been blogging as long as some graybeards, so the earliest recollection I can recall was when Technorati revealed some data on blogging which suggested that it had plateaued off.  It was last year, as I recall.  Lots of handwringing around that time.  Twitter existed.  Facebook existed.

I think my position then is the same as it is now.  For those who like / love / accept blogging, the diversification of online voice is an inevitable non-threatening event.  There were a LOT of blogs pre-Twitter (and even pre-Facebook) that were false starts and abortive events in the making.  There were many people calling themselves “bloggers” who were not really — in the sense that they tried it, then gave it up.  Wasn’t really their cup of tea.

And I think that is, as they say, totally “ok”.

The explosion of the ways people can share their opinion, voice, and mind capital is a very good thing.  It allows folks to find a niche for the way they want to express themselves.  And that’s totally fine, because folks who find Twitter is more their bag shouldn’t be blogging anyway.

Of course you can do both.  Its no more mutually exclusive than peanut butter and jam (which is to say that it can be quite complementary) — but I was referring to people who really find their voice on microblogging services to the exclusion of blogging.

Bloggers, or those who formerly blog, leaving for other new media forms of expression … well, it shrinks the pond for whoever’s left.  That usually means, I find, concentrating talent.  Which, as I believe, is a very good thing.

Blogging lends itself to a longer form of expression.  Something that can be rambling, but something that has the potential for distilled and substantive thought.  Without transmogrifying into a “this is why blogging is great post”, it also offers people to really own their ideas, and express it in a way that is available to everyone.  Not merely yoru Twitter group.  Or your “friends” (wherever they may be, in whatever social network they might be).  And for the Google-conscious of you, it certainly means that the public at large will better be able to find *your* opinion more easily as well — Twitter, Friendfeed, and all of their ilk are poorly indexed.

There is some further handwringing over how blogs have not innovated, or renovated, or something to that effect, which, I think is on the hogwash-y side of things.  Blogs have their place in the new media ecosystem, and it is one that is maturing, as we see blogs take their place — and the bloggers who own them — as part of the mainstream media.  Smaller bloggers may not consider entities like the “HuffingtonPost” or the “Daily Kos” “blogs” anymore by their sheer size alone.

But to separate them based on their size would be a ludicrous butchering of what a definition means, as whatever a ‘blog’ is should encompass all forms of that Thing in spite of its size.

The fracturing of online conversations was inevitable.  It will continue to happen ad infinitum, with the happy tension of aggregators trying to rein in all conversations at the same time.  Blogs have their place in all of that.  It was at there at the beginning and it will be there at the end.  

And that is totally ok.