Whistling Past the Graveyard?

I first noticed the phenomenon when I read this piece in the NYT two years ago, which was further reenforced by the demise of about one-third of the blogs in my sidebar.  "Blogging is dead," claimed the Times and my personal experience seemed to validate that "fact."  A lot o' people I used to read simply abandoned the medium for the hated Facebook... mainly coz FB is easier to update and it's easier to read (that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it).  You'll see a lot of articles similar to that old Times piece if you google "death of blogs."  OTOH, you'll also find this light at the end o' the tunnel:

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

[...]

When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren't bloggers after all – but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.

Mr. Doctorow goes on to say blogging is alive and well, even if the audiences are smaller than they used to be.  Well, OK, Cory.  I hope you're right... but I'm thinkin' the war is over and us bloggers are fighting a rear-guard action.  Further evidence is in my SiteMeter numbers, which continue to tell me a sad, sad story.  

All THAT said, it'll be a cold day in Hell before I reactivate my FB page.  Mebbe I'll just start tweeting more or get back to G+ (which I hardly ever visit these days).  Or perhaps I'll just stand here in front of the empty barn and continue shouting at the owls, as Lileks so colorfully put it quite some time ago.

Sigh.

Update, 1104 hrs:  Speakin' o' Twitter...

Heh.