Quick question: When was the last time you heard, or said, the word “blogosphere”?

Yesterday, at the RWW 2Way conference, Jason Calacanis took the stage and proclaimed that blogging is dead.  You can — and should — read RWW’s recap of the talk here.  (As an aside, he — and I — believe that email newsletters are making a come back; read more here.)

I’ve had blogs before.  I had a sports blog for most of the early part of the last (!) decade.  I co-founded an online sports blogging community in 2005.   Both were moderately successful, in the least.  

In 2002 or 2003, growing an audience for your blog was a function of the blogosphere. A bunch of bloggers would, independently, write about the same topic.  One would discover another, etc. etc., and in the end, each would link back to the other — and the conversation would continue in a subsequent post.  Others would join in, while readers would surf link after link, discovering new blogs to read along the way.

By and large, though, that’s gone.  And with it went discovery.   

I don’t know if blogging is dead, but the blogosphere (outside of Tumblr?) certainly is — and that was a huge part of what made blogging fun and engaging.