It wasn’t too long ago when my poll asking if blogging was dying concluded with an astounding NO. BookTwo.org recently published an article highlighting a change that is taking place within the blogosphere.

I’ve noticed a trend in longtime bloggers, which I’m certainly a part of. Blogging less, linking more, generally winding down the straight blog in favour of a more distributed presence via Twitter, Delicious, videoblog apps like Seesmic. Some of these may be fed through the blog, like Booktwo’s RSS links, but it’s all getting a bit bitty. “I think RSS is one of the main reasons for this (perceived) decline in blogging. We don’t visit each others’ sites, so it’s less obvious when the frequency declines. As more small social apps like Twitter, and larger ones like Facebook, increase their reach, we don’t need blogs as our home pages either.

“It’s good to have a place to put these things, thoughts, articles &c. But I think it’s time, and I think it’s happening, that the delivery mechanism was stripped down. RSS might be the answer: people are starting to have ‘lifefeeds’ more and more, which aggregate everything they’re doing.

Unfortunately, BookTwo is on to something. What’s also interesting to note, is that this article falls in line with Steve Spaldings take on where blogging is heading.

Microblogging will be the critical change in the way we write in Web 3.0. Imagine a world where your mobile phone, your email, and you television could all produce feedback that could easily be pushed to any or all blogging platforms. If you take a picture from your smart-phone, it would be automatically tagged, bagged and forwarded to your “lifestream”. If you rated a television show that you were watching, your review would be forwarded into the stream.

This is the type of seamless integration that will finally bring the concept of blogging to the masses. Posts will become shorter and more topical, the world of rehashing the meme will be replaced by one where life and news generation go hand in hand. Blogging won’t be a hobby reserved for internet enthusiasts, but a past time for the MySpace generation.

Of course, the allure of any individual blog would be much more limited. As the popularity of micro-blogging explodes, more and more basically “unreadable” blog will start to populate the blogosphere. It’s not hard to imagine a world where the vast majority of your posts amount to, “stuck in traffic, ugh…”

That last sentence in Steves take on blogging is the one that concerns me the most. The last thing I want the blogosphere to turn into is a series of links with little substance. I want to see bloggers continue to write their opinions, reporting on things in their own way, and continue to be the driving force behind new media. I want to continue to see quality content written by someone other than big media properties. Continue to blog and if you need to share links, create a link blog as I illustrated how to do in a previous article.

I don’t want to see everyone’s blog turn into a lifestream of links. Do you?