We'll be addressing this further on the "John Wagner has been dragged back into the darkness of meatspace" Squidoo lens.
John,
Yeah, you've gotta be able to do both, which makes you truly bilingual. And probably keeps you/me/everyone sane 
It's all about balance. No one strategy or tactic works all the time in every situation.
It's up to us to be familiar with all the tools out there, and use the ones that best serve our clients and employers.
Unfortunately, many people like to jump on a bandwagon, and forget about other modes of transportation. (Sorry for the lame analogy!)
Mike
Boy, am I with you there, John. I like to put my feet into new areas, like social media, mainly to learn about what's important to the people actually living life. Marinating in it full time is something different. It may make you an uber expert or celebrity in some circles, but I'm not really interested in that.
Perspective, as I write on myself ad nauseum I'm sure, is never, ever underrated. The more I get out of the office and make observations about real life, the more I realize how dumb I can be sometimes.
I very much like the in between world. It's where the most fun is, and not coincidentally, the most value.
There is only one real world.
Blogging is trivial avocation that a select limited few in PR have raised to new religion. Silly.
- Amanda
Excellent words, all.
As I slog through my newsreader each day, I see so many posts filled with so much stuff that is of no value to me that I wonder how I allowed myself to get stuck in this situation.
It's not a matter of not having the time to go through it all any more. It's that there are much better things in life to be doing!
Maybe it's time to clean-out the ol' newsreader, John! 
Actually, I am only half-joking. My hard drive reformatted a few weeks ago, and I had to re-build my feedlist. I tended to over-subscribe in the early days of my RSS usage, and wound up glad for the chance to only re-subscribe to the blogs that I tended to read daily (and thus remembered where to find them so I could re-up the feed).
Smaller feedlist = more time to live outside the blogosphere.
Come back, John, we miss you!
Seriously, I respect your decision to take a step back. I'm sorry that you feel you got "stuck" in a world of diminishing returns.
I certainly have had that happen to me -- that's exactly how I felt when I left journalism.
Funny, I just stepped away from my blog for nearly three weeks, and when I got back, I was excited about posting again. So I guess that's good news for me -- that I missed it.
But if it ever stops being fun, that's when I'll stop.
John:
I've had several periods in the last year when I just stopped posting for a week or two. And sometimes I just clean out my feed reader and start sort of clean.
There's still lots of stuff to explore and to talk about. I just try to find a way not to get too obsessed with it.
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