Web analytics, web metrics, and how to use them to track and improve conversions

Is Blog Traffic dropping for Bloggers due to the proliferation of Social Networks, or are bloggers writing less posts that people want to read?  Maybe Social Networks are being blamed but their not the only reason why traffic might be dropping (BTW, Seth Godin has a long post about how to get traffic for your blog - if that's the real problem).

But if Social Networks are stealing traffic from blogs  - you can blame it on MySpace (see chart below from HitWise):

Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent mentioned that she's getting saturated with Social Networks (I also posted about seeing too many Social Networks popping up, earlier today). 

This all came about due to speculation that bloggers may become obsolete, losing traffic as their audiences move over to Social Networks (why, I'm not 100% sure) to get all their needs filled (that used to be met by reading blogs).

"...There's a passionate conversation going on at Deep Jive Interests, started somewhere at Scobleizer and continued at Gapingvoid. Tony Hung took it over to The Blog Herald. Hint, there is mention again of the A-list and social networks. Ich bin auf der Z-Liste! I always wanted to say that in German. Thank you, Tony.

Have you seen your blog traffic decrease? According to Scoble's friends, this is because they assume their readers are now off to social networks. How many friends do you really have? How many people can you really call friends? I mentioned I have an extensive network in a previous post, these are not all friends and most do not read my blog. I will post about how to grow and nurture such a group in the future."

Here's my position - it's probably not Social Networks causing the decrease in Blog Traffic, it's blog reader fatigue.  I think 95% of the people who could have joined a Social Network haven't joined one yet (though people who read blogs regularly are more likely to join a Social Network than those that don't).

People are too busy to be involved in more than 1 or 2 Social Networks at most anyway.  Is it likely people who joined FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn or are Tweeting on Twitter and found they get all the needs met on their Social Networks so they don't read blogs as much?

I find that far fetched.