PORTLAND, Ore. - It appears that ORblogs, a Web site that aggregates blogs from across Oregon - and which has been providing a stream of the state's blog consciousness for the past five years - will be shutting down, according to a message posted on the site on Thursday. 

Paul Bausch, creator of the Web site, wrote:

I'm shutting ORblogs down now because the site continues to grow and the job of maintaining the site at the level I feel is necessary to keep it valuable has grown with it, putting it out of the bounds of a hobby. I wasn't able to make ORblogs self-sustaining financially (let alone turn it into a job), and I can no longer devote the time to the site that it needs to grow. Read the rest...

A sigh of discontent was already beginning to make the rounds in Oregon's blogosphere once folks started catching wind of the news:

• Can ORBlogs be saved? - Silicon Florist
• Rallying to Save ORBlogs - Our PDX Network
• Major, major loss to the Oregon blogosphere - Jack Bog's Blog
• ORblogs has Closed - edwardjoninoregon
• ORblogs calls it quits - B. Dorr's Blog
• ORBlogs is gone? No, we can't let it go! - Positively Glorious!
• Sad that ORBlogs is closing - Josh Bancroft's Life Stream
• ORBlogs.com Shuts Down - re:PDX

Hundreds of blogs throughout Oregon, most of them in Portland, are listed with ORblogs, which bills itself as "a running stream of Oregon news, commentary and photography from local weblogs."

According to Bausch's statement on the site, ORblogs is no longer streaming blog post excerpts but the current weblog directory will stay up for another 30 days.