I just want to make it clear from the start that I have for sometime felt that there is going to be a shake-out in the blogosphere. While I couldn’t really put my finger on the reason I felt that way I knew in my gut that it was coming. The rumblings could be heard in the different corners of places like Friendfeed, Twitter and the blogs. The natives were getting restless and time was becoming a commodity that we just didn’t seem to have enough of anymore.

People who had previously started blogs as a way to express themselves were abandoning them in favor of the simplicity and immediacy of the real-time web. This was the beginning and in a lot of ways I look upon it as a good thing because really when push comes to shove it helped reduce the competition for readers.

It didn’t just stop there though as we are now beginning to see established voices in social media having to decide just where they should be spending their social media capital. We have Steve Rubel moving away from the blogging format because it is to archaic. We have Michael Arrington abandoning Friendfeed because of the underlying mob mentality that lives and breath in real-time response.

At the same time we have bloggers reaffirming the importance and the return to the idea that for bloggers our blog is the real hub of our online community. Louis Gray called it the foundation in a world of streams. Brian Clark likened the changes to the short tail of blogging. In the end though it all boiled down to the fact that blogs are still very much a central force that isn’t going anywhere.

I think it all comes down to something much more important – time. As much as we might like to think that we can be everywhere all the time the reality is much different. For those who either don’t blog or have decided to move beyond blogging it isn’t a problem to sit around Friendfeed, or Twitter, or Facebook all day watching the real-time web going by.

On the other hand those of us that have succumbed to the need to write about the things we think about when it comes to what is happening around us are finding ourselves being stretched in every direction. We are lead to believe that in order to write about all that is happening we need to be constantly involved in everything.

We need to be constantly reading every tweet that goes by on Twitter. We need to have as many followers as possible and following as many people as possible. We need to be immersing ourselves in the real-time river of non-stop yattering that is happening on Friendfeed. Pick a social media service and by unspoken expectations we are suppose to be fully involved.

However you stretch something far enough and long enough cracks will begin to appear – it’s inevitable – the system will break – we will break.

At some point we need to step back, if only for a little bit like Scoble has, and realize that it’s okay to just dip our toes in the water. It’s okay to concentrate our efforts in one area. It’s okay not to be everywhere at once – we don’t need to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

There is nothing wrong with blogging, or Friendfeed, or Twitter, or Facebook, or any of the other social services out there. Where we have gone off the rails is believing that we are capable of living in all of them all of the time.

We are not super beings even though we might like to live like on on the Web. We do not have the ability to constantly absorb information without taking time out to ruminate over it, to toss it around, to slice and dice it. We need to be able to step back and let those thoughts rattle around in our heads.

The shakeup that is coming isn’t a bad thing. In fact I think it is a great idea and in some ways overdue.