The funny thing is that this particular meme has some legs under other titles, such as “the evolution of conversation”, or “the further maturation of blogging”, or “the atomization of attention”.

But to declare blogging dead, and THEN spout off a list of reasons that are so myopic they border on cluelessness — its just plain narcissistic.

Here’s why.

His big claims as to why blogging dead revolves around a few ideas (I have parsed these heavily)

i) bloggers are dying to be heard via social “accelerants” like Digg or Techmeme

ii) they therefore spend more time promoting their posts than spending time *on* their posts, via Digg, Techmeme, or Twitter

iii) to excel in blogging means excelling in saying inflammatory things — i.e. link bait (yes, the irony is towering and overwhelming, I know)

iv) email lists avoid the promotion machine

v) email lists avoid the “problem” of an open conversation

I’m not going to debate each point, because, by now, I’m sure you’ve already seen the fallacy in each statement (but for a breakdown, see Steve Hodson).

But to suffice it to say that I found these ideas to be terribly narcissistic, only in so far that it seems narcissistic to condemn an entire way of communicating based on observations that really — by and large — involve experiences that are central to the way that a very narrow band of individuals have experienced them.

There are many, many, many other bloggers who don’t read Techmeme, and who don’t care.  In the niches they occupy there aren’t “social accelerants”, because they don’t yet exist for those niches.  And they may never yet.  Try submitting something to Reddit on the wonders of single parent hood / mommyhood, or Digg on some interesting, yet obscure, scientific factoid, for example.  You already know they’re not going anywhere.

And yet there are groups and ecosystems of bloggers out there, having a ball writing about these kinds of things.  They are just as valid and just as existential as tech bloggers, and other heavy weight, or wannabe heavy weight bloggers that Mr. Calacanis is basing his opinions on.

In fact, the kind of phenomenon Mr. Calacanis is describing really describes, I’d say, a tiny, tiny percentage of bloggers out there.  I mean, besides the tech blogging community, how many other bloggers are actively and as aggressively pursuing technologies like Twitter, Friendfeed, or Seesmic as a portion of their daily blogging “activities”?

You all know the round-about answer to that, and the answer of course is “nearly nil”.

So, to castigate and declare “dead” an entire medium like blogging based on some very narrow opinions is — well, yes, quite douchy indeed.  And I dare say its narcissistic as well, as you’re assuming “everyone” (i.e. the blogosphere at large) is experiencing the same malaise over blogging that one person (or a small group of people) are.

Blogging is maturing, that’s true enough.  There are tools now that didn’t exist years ago.  Its even easier.  And yet there are even more ways to broadcast your opinion and have other people interact back with you.  Its not that blogging is *DEAD* so much that blogging is changing, and its role is changing within the ecosystem of conversations and online communications.

And if you can’t see that?  Well, maybe you didn’t really get blogging in the first place.

Jason Calacanis has decreed that blogging isn’t a personal enough a medium for him, and wants to use an email list to stay in contact with his friends and close associates.  Quoth the ultimo mahalo

“I’m going to try and build a deeper relationship with fewer people … acoustic, something more authentic and something more private. Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it”

It may well be that Jason’s tired of a great many things in blogging, perhaps, namely the necessity to put something down that’s original and cogent in a consistent fashion (something that I have been sorely lacking for a great number of months), that’s not merely Mahalo link pimping.

And if that’s the case — fine.

But let me join the chorus of doubters, nay-sayers, and “haters” (who Jason calls out on as a ‘reason’ to stop blogging) in calling BullShit on his “official” reason, above.

There is no way, in anyway shape or form, that an email list is *more* personal and *more* intimate than blogging.  An email list is wonderful for any number of things, but just like Jason’s desire to limit comments when and where he feels like it — and I totally agree with Mat Ingram on this one — its more of a pulpit than anything else, where, like “old” or “traditional” media, you tell people what you think, and they may or may not reply.

You might or might not, in truth, reply back, and its up to you whether you publish any replies.  The “audience”, as it were, never gets privvy to the conversations unless *you* decide to publish them.

And in my mind there’s nothing more traditional and *less* intimate for the audience than that.  I agree — it might be getting back to Jason’s roots (at the Silicon Alley Reporter, a traditional magazine) — but there’s no logical way that it is a better tool for getting closer to people.

If Jason were really bugged by the haters (of which I really think there are few), the link baiting accusations, the Techmeme chasing and so on — then all he has to do is ignore it.

Yet, in truth, Mr. Calacanis hasn’t been in the thick of things for such a long time, its hard to believe that he’d still be sensitive to it.

But heck … I guess giving a story like *that* is better than saying “I’m tired of linking to Mahalo all the time as an excuse for a blog”, isn’t it?

Also: shout out to Jim Kukral for animating the dead corpse of a meme on “a-listers are they dead, yet?” (and the answer, of course, is actually “no” :)