This comes from a post by Rob on a blog called Coconut Headsets. No idea how I once stumbled on it, but a good snippet for all:

Like most human expression though, as it became cool, everyonewanted to do it, and most people were lousy at it. At birth, the blogosphere was the very antithesis of the shoddy amateurism with which the mainstream media portrayed it. Now that blogs have grown up, we see that the mainstream media was right. Blogs suck. Not all of them, just most of them.

You see, those of you who don’t produce media don’t realize that the very structure of modern media necessitates the constant production of crap. I don’t mean bad writing. The writing is very good. I don’t mean uninteresting content, on the contrary, it can be very interesting. What I mean is that the thinking behind most of what is written on blogs is lousy, or more likely non-existent.

The web today is driven by novelty and recency. In order for content companies to survive, they must produce fresh content at an incredible pace. The result, is articles that are more designed to get you clicking than to get you thinking. When you are forced to write a lot, the quality will inevitably go down.

So, over the past two years or so, my blog reading has declined. As the average intellectual quality of blog content decreased, and the average person began reading blogs, I decided to find a new source of inspiration, so I turned back to books.

I still think there are many gems to be found in the blogosphere, but you have to do some work to go through the crap. It’s true, there is a lot of crap and it’s overfilling at an increased rate.

However smart people who have things to share or teach us are still out there if you look hard. In my experience though, these people aren’t out there permanently. They go through phases of writing and sharing, and then they get busy with other things.

So if you are lucky to find a true inspiration in his or her blogging phase, it can be a real treat. However later, they either stop blogging or hire others to contribute and keep the blog “alive” instead of them. That just seems as the natural evolution in many cases.