One of the things I mentioned in my “items that might grow up to be blog posts” post from last night was an entry by Phil Sim of Squash about how the tech blogosphere has “peaked.” Phil, who is a bit of a curmudgeon at times - …

Rob Hyndman asks some interesting questions about how long a blogger can blog. He links to Phil Sim, who suggests that two years is the maximum for any sustained creative effort (he’s talking about the tech blogosphere, whatever that is,…

- I wonder if part of the reason for bloggers finding that everything gets old quick is the fact that most blogging is opinion rather than reporting or investigation. It’s much easier to write a quick post with my opinion on what someone else posted than it it to go out into the world and find something new. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that nearly everone takes the less difficult route (myself included) and there’s a lack of balance. By taking the easier option a lot of the richness of the real world is missed and we end up with a a large part of the blogosphere talking about the same things, in a kind of a feedback loop.

- A suggestion I’ve heard from Merlin Mann recently was that it’s a great idea to start up a blog on a particular, focused topic but with a finite life expectancy. That way you can post the hell out of it, while knowing that you don’t have to keep doing it forever, which should help to avoid burnout. I guess this is the same thing as Phil Sims saying that he won’t edit a publication for more that 2 years, to keep it fresh.

Has tech blogging peaked? I don’t think so, but I’m an optimist on these things. I suspect we’ll start to see a shift in the topics and styles of tech blogging, perhaps rather than 1,000 bloggers all posting on web 2.0 (and linking to the same stuff) we’ll see 900 blogging on web 3.0 and 100 posting on their own niche interests and expertise. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more original content too, so that the 98% of the world that isn’t currently blogged gets some attention.