Where have all the blogs gone?

When I started as a journalist/blogger five years with the launch of Silicon Valley Watcher, there were lots of blogs around. Om Malik with GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, etc. I was a newbie. But that was fine with me because that meant I didn't have to get into tiresome "religious" debates about using strikeouts, commenting policies, updating protocols, and much more.

The blogs at the time were news-like but also very personal. I wanted to be less personal, I wanted to publish an online news magazine.

So it is with a sense of irony that five years later, the "blogs" have become news magazines and SVW has become more personal, more blog-like.

GigaOm, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and others, have become online news magazines with reporters, editors, production staff. Just because they publish using a blogging platform doesn't make them blogs.

They look the same as the traditional media publications of 2004, such as CNET's News.com. The new media now looks pretty much the same as the old media it replaced.

Does this mean that the "new" media might be vulnerable to displacement by a new generation of "blogs" in the same way they themselves displaced the older generation of news sites? Maybe.