Is the Golden Age of Tech Blogging Dead?

Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst with the Altimeter Group, believes innovative tech blogging is done with.

He identifies four trends that include corporate acquisitions that stymie innovation (eg., AOL’s takeover of Techcrunch and Engadget), talent turnover of the major tech blogs (eg., people are growing up and moving on from the Mashables of the world), audience desire for smaller and shorter analysis (eg., why read a blog when you can interact on Twitter, G+ and hello, Tumblr), and the simple fact that the medium has matured with not many able to make a living through blogging alone.

The post is interesting and includes commentary from stalwarts like Ben Parr and Ben Metcalfe. Owyang also links out to related, anecdotal articles from ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch and Poynter.

What’s interesting above and beyond tech blogging though is that you could apply this across most any vertical. Blogging rose to prominence in the early 2000s and dedicated, talented first movers laid claim to rich content areas. As they gained success, those verticals became saturated.

The idea appears to be trending, with Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis recently telling ReadWriteWeb that blogging as a whole “is largely dead.”

Now the stampede is to stake out territory in the social web, and here again we enter something of another golden age.