I also think what’s happening with these transitory services is that they’re sucking so much mind share that much of the blog content and community driven social networking has become an echo chamber. For this reason I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to extract myself. An IT conversation from SupaNova with Denise Howell and Clay Shirky reaffirmed that for me.

Another area is video sucking a lot of time and attention. However I think the largest contributing factor is the developing social graph. People are communicating and creating that many more relationships that leaving time for less interactive communication formats is difficult.

I have changed my reference links to a certain extent, though…sometimes using Amigofish, or another “podcast aggregator” type service for the NL2 urls. I started that thinking it was a good idea, but this post points out part of the issue…I’m abstracting away from your site. Now, I’m certainly no traffic driver personally, but in the aggregate, that does affect you, perhaps. Amigofish is “well-behaved” in the sense that it doesn’t cache your ‘casts, or anything…it ends up pointing people back to ITC/MC feeds directly, but still, I think I’ll change that practice for podcasts that have well-defined linkback pages (like you guys).

Thanks for the post, Doug. It’s interesting to see behind the scenes on this stuff, and think about the big picture along with you.