There is a lot of talk about blogging, that it is coming to an end and what might happen to it. Earlier this week, The New York Times said it was doing away with blogs and reporters were bloggers. The big media, and most have always confused blogs and blogging with a system of publishing. It is more of a philosophy, a sensibility and a point of view/lens into the world, as I have written in the past on number of occasions.

Mathew Ingram, who like me is an old school blogger, has weighed in on the matter over at Gigaom and points out that just as newspapers absorbed their digital efforts into editorial operations, they essentially killed any possibility of reinvention for the digital future. And with blogs being absorbed into the main editorial, the Times is killing the soul of blogging. Today, Dave Winer, who I affectionately call Blog father, sums it up:

Before Google Reader and Twitter it was a mix of short title-less items, and longer essays, some with comments others without. Look at the archive page for March 2001 for an idea. (I picked that month at random.) …… Blogging started as a very irreverent thing. If it’s going to be anything as we go forward, we have to stop caring what other entities think we are and focus on what we think we are.

Blogs are our digital homesteads and will also mean more to an individual that to a big business/editorial operation.

Update: As Dave had said back in the early days of news-oriented blogs, “Blogging doesn’t eliminate what reporters do, but it changes it. The Times never had blogs. It would have been wonderful if they had, but they merely used blogging software in their editorial process. “