Steve Broback breaks the news that this year's event in Chicago is canceled:

Despite strong participation from sponsors and our long-time community members, we just weren’t seeing the registrations we hoped for from the local, Chicago-area bloggers and PR/marketing professionals that were required to support the event.

Our conferences have always relied heavily on local participation, and our feeling is that Chicago has been very well served this year by at least two excellent, and very reasonably priced blogger conferences: SOBcon and BlogHer. A third event close on the heels of these other shows is obviously a tough sell. In addition, it’s clear from discussions with local marketers that blogging has normalized and is not the disruptive force it was back in 2004 when we launched the BBS.

Broback echoes what a lot of folks have been saying: that blogs are now just one tool in a whole social-media toolkit that needs to be explored mroe fully.

Thus the launch of the Web Community Forum and its first event, focused entirely on Facebook.

This new conference is attractive for a number of reasons, one of which is that the mighty Jeremiah is speaking.

(Via Teresa Valdez Klein on Twitter.)