You're right blogs and forums will stay, I think this whole social networking trend is just a fad and will end soon enough. Blogs and forums are the basics but it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future.
It takes a lot of hard work and effort to make and run a forum especially of you are doing it on your own. You have to come up with good content, good money and a lot of time. To put all of this together is going to take a lot of effort.
Myspace comes in years 2000 after that was Facebook and soon I'm sure something gonna replace Facebook. However, forums stays on the internet since 90'. Forums is not gonna dies, it just improve to be a better forums. I'm sure some new software gonna replace vbulletin soon or later.
older, more populated forums can "die out" if they do not focus on getting new members. Any forum will die if abandoned or if the leaders go inactive.
Take this forum as a prime example of the fact they are not on their death bed. There is millions of communities out there.
Yeah I never really noticed that until now, I bet it's Twitter taking over and answer sites like StackExchange and YA.
Every few months all forums loses some posting then about 6 weeks later posting picks up again. Like when students are taking final being of each semester brings lower posting & spring break summer & christmas time bring higher posting
i dont think the forums are dying i think the owners dont update or long on as much they think its going to be an easy quick money then get into it and think wow this is tough. Or get big and then slack off.