Providence native Leo Laporte, whose syndicated show "The Tech Guy" airs on more than 100 radio stations, XM and online, fell off the social media grid for 16 days and nobody noticed.

He'd been posting in Google Buzz, which works rather like Facebook with longer posts and comments. Then, August 22, he led his Leoville blog with Buzz Kill: "Something happened tonight that made me question everything I've done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006."

This is a man with more than 220,000 Twitter followers. He was using Buzz exclusively, "replacing Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook," and feeding Buzz posts to Twitter.

...nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. Fifteen posts buried...

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I've posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I've been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

Thank God the content I deem most important, my Internet and broadcast radio shows, still stand. I believe in what I'm doing there, and have been very fortunate to have found an audience. I'm pretty sure I would have heard from people if there had been 16 days of dead silence there. Hell, if we miss one show I get hundreds of emails. But I feel like I've woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I've put in others' hands. It's been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I'd have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more.

He's still Tweeting, links and thoughts such as "Sometimes I just want to copy someone else's status, word for word, and see if they notice," and his blog is now back bigtime.

There's a happy ending: I Got My Binky Back!

I'm happy to say the bug is fixed, I'm back on Buzz, and the lesson is learned. I'll start content here on my blog, but push links to it to Buzz, Twitter, and Friendfeed. Any comments you post on those fora will be automagically piped back into my comments here (thanks to JS-Kit Echo). Best of both worlds.

Shortly thereafter, 26-year-old CEO Spencer Fry chimed in with Down With Social: Social is immeasurable and a waste of time.

I admit to having ridden the social media bandwagon from the start -- mainly because I had to see how things would play out -- but I've always been skeptical about its impact. Is anyone reading what you have to say? Do they even care? With so much information flowing, how can anything be absorbed?

Bonus link: The L.A. Times Business section profiled Leo LaPorte Wednesday: Podcaster Leo Laporte, the everywhere man. Actually, he lives in Petaluma, Calif. now.