If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.
What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
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