Over at Urban Vancouver, Ray points to an interesting post by Nicholas Carr on Rough Type. The discussion is about the death of the blog, now that many blogs had morphed into media sites with multiple authors, targeted ads, various gadgets and multiple posts a day.

I’ve been thinking about this myself lately. I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer blogs with a single author and those that provide full text feeds. I’d made the decision about full text RSS a while ago, and I’ve already pruned my feeds on that count. Now I find I’m spending less and less time reading blogs with multiple authors.

As Nicholas says:

“As blogs have become mainstream, they’ve lost much of their original personality.”

I don’t mind an occasional guest post on a blog, but I’m really there to learn what the individual blogger has to offer. It may be the personality of his/her writing, the knowledge they choose to share, or something about the interests they have. I find it much like getting to know someone and enjoying their company.

If they want me to meet their friends, they can link to those friend’s blogs, and if they sound interesting to me, I’ll visit. I may even add them to my list of feeds.

Sure, I still visit blogs like Lifehacker and pop in on Gizmodo once in a while, but that’s usually when I want a quick fix of a specific type of news. I may also jump over to CBC or other websites depending on the kind of news I’m after.

But for the most part, I stick with personal blogs. I get enough ‘media’ every day already. To me, a more personal blog is what blogging reading is all about.