While people were all hyped up about getting their new iPhones, Jason Calacanis posted that he is officially retiring from blogging. In the blog post announcing Jason’s retirement is the following paragraph.

Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it. I’d rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation.

Interestingly, Jason is turning to a form of online communication that is not as new and shiny as blogging.

Starting today all of my thoughts will be reserved for a new medium. Something smaller, something more intimate, and something very personal: an email list. Today the email list has about 600 members, I’m going to cut it off when it reaches 750. Frankly, that’s enough more than enough people to have a conversation with. I’m going to try and build a deeper relationship with fewer people–try to get back to my roots.

That’s right. Jason is actually going to use an email list for communication to the rest of the world. Of course, the part where he cuts off the subscription at 750 members is incorrect. I believe that the cutoff limit has passed a thousand subscribers.

When I saw the part about the email list, I subscribed immediately. For those of you that did not subscribe, you can check out a Posterous blog containing the content of the latest newsletter.

Steven Hodson of Winextra has read the latest email newsletter and offers his take on it. Below is a rather large excerpt from the Winextra post.

He [Jason] starts out the newsletter with a couple of paragraphs of discounting the idea that this was all a joke and then gets to the gist of the inaugural newsletter with
this

Is blogging dead?
————————-
Yes, it is. Officially.

Okay folks it’s official we can all hang up out blogs as a waste of time and go onto other things because Jason says so. Wow that’s a hellva responsibility to take on there Jason – being the arbiter of a whole medium’s validity.

He then follows that up with

Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts
than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging
Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to
win at blogging: “show up every day.” In 2003 and 2004 that was the
case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your
message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from
whatever you’ve said.

Well Jason you may have been concerned with SEO and digg points or felt you needed to hire a bunch of experts in the social media field (the field you yourself felt you were knowledgeable so many times) but to suggest that this is something that all bloggers concern themselves with is just assuming too damn much. I have been doing this for some time and I couldn’t give a damn about SEO or whether I’ve been on digg or whether I have the most followers on Twitter. There are a lot of bloggers out there who I am sure feel exactly the same way and for you to paint all bloggers with this paintbrush is in a way rather insulting.

Jason, in the email newsletter, says that blogging is dead. In Jason’s final blog post, he says,

First, please don’t take this as a condemnation of blogging. I love blogs and always will.

I believe that Steven Hodson is correct. Blogging is not dead and bloggers don’t have to worry about Digg, Techmeme, etc. Blogging, at least in my mind, is just about sharing ideas and building a community. While Jason Calacanis can do that in an email newsletter, I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with blogging.

I do believe that Jason can teach us a lesson here. Maybe we should be a little less obsessed with search engine optimization and Techmeme and spend more time on making high quality posts.

For additional reading, you can check out:

• Diary of a Rat: There Will Always Be an A-list
• jimkukral.com: The Death Of The A-list
• louisgray.com: Walking the SEO Balance Beam
• seanpercival.com: Top 5 Reasons Jason Calacanis is NOT Quiting Blogging
• mathewingram.com/work: Jason’s long goodbye: Give me a break
• Scobleizer: Jason Calacanis hands keys to blogosphere to Louis Gray