A number of blogs have been linking to Laura’s reflection on how blogging has changed in the past six years. I don’t think there has actually been much decline in quality overall — when it declines in one part it improves in another. But certainly a lot of things have shifted. I think Laura’s probably right that people have localized — blogger used to range far more widely, but now mostly stick to comfortable neighborhoods. I think regular use of feed readers has changed things; it helps people to organize their reading more efficiently, but by the same token means that they focus on things they already know they’ll be interested in, leaving less room for the occasional delightful surprise. It’s also been a major factor in the decline of the blogroll. I think the link monitoring thing has made a major difference; the TTLB Ecosystem used to be very useful, and then broke, and has never really been brought back to its former usability. Technorati used to be extraordinarily reliable; it’s still useful, and still pretty much the handiest thing in this regard, but now it does weird things at regular intervals and is often very slow in listing links.