Anthropologists and historians in the future looking back on the 21^st century will have an easy job. A cross section of life is laid out in blogs, Flickr Twitter, Facebook and forums.

We’re micro-blogging more than ever but are blogging less. Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel are among the A list bloggers that have switched from blogging to so-called lifestreaming.

Ged Carroll notes that Robert Scoble has seen a dramatic drop in readership since his move towards lifestreaming.

Little wonder. Lifestreaming is dull. Most people simply don’t have interesting enough lives. At best it’s a sequential record of random events recorded in a sentence or an image. To claim its anything else misses the point.

My use of Flickr is the closest I get to lifestreaming. To anyone outside my immediate network of family and friends my stream of images is boring as hell. But I make no apologies. It’s a personal record and it’s not intended to engage.

Ged reckons that blogging has passed through the hype cycle and is maturing. He’s spot on.

“Over the past ten years or so, we have seen blogging climb to what can be reasonably considered to be a peak of unrealistic expectations and it could be considered to heading towards a trough of disillusionment.”

Likewise Stuart Bruce says blogging – not lifestreaming – is the way forward if you want to develop thought leadership. He makes the point that blogs are far more Google friendly than micro-blogs.

Take note.