The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual bloggers are like

The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual bloggers are like AP reporters and aggregators are the new newspapers. Dozens of AP stories are filed every day and local newspapers pick and choose which ones to include in each edition. The major difference between the traditional newspaper model and link aggregators is that we can easily see all stories filed by an individual blogger, whether they get picked up by our "hometown" paper or not[0]. Sharing a link to a blog post on facebook will never replace quality journalism of course, but I think we've come full circle back to this model because it works. Most people don't have the time or inclination to follow a multitude of different blogs or maintain their own. They just want news and opinion selected for them, by trained editors or a community, and the ability to comment on those stories. An open exchange of long form ideas between a network of people who each run their own blog has an important place in internet culture, but it doesn't scale very well. It was a golden age, for a time, but the aggregation model as the potential to open those ideas up to a much broader range of people. [0] I'm actually not sure if the AP allows people to easily "follow" all stories filed by specific reporters, but it doesn't seem like it.