I was thinking just the same thing today....

....well, actually increasingly over the last week or so - watching the crap spouted over the Yahoo / Microsoft merger on Techymeme I felt I wanted my own Techmeme (TechMe?) that sourced the blogs I like, not ones with big circulation that merely rehash the same ol' same old with no added value.

In fact, I Twittered it as a microthought (from my microbrain

So I was zeitgasping when I read this from Peer Pressure (On Techmeme, ironically):

I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve simply become bored with the self-referential ranting of the tech blogosphere or whether it has actually become boring. I still read Techmeme every day, but I’m increasingly drawn to a select group of publishers: mainstream publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc.), a small handful of professional-quality tech news/analysis blogs (Ars Technica, Read/Write Web, sometimes TechCrunch), individuals with real credentials (Nick Carr. John Battelle, etc.), speciality blogs (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, TorrentFreak, etc.), company blogs and the occasional random article that catches my eye.

My thoughts (and some of the blogs I follow) exactly!. In fact I read Techmeme about twice a day now (and usually a scan rather than a long dwell), and increasingly just read (and blog my comments here) on the blogs I follow. Also, although the demise of the me-too sloshblogs is clearly nigh, there is hope for the smaller high value "microcap" blogs:

The other area that has a bright future is specialty blogging. Rather than reading what some dude who has built up a big audience by blogging something generic about absolutely every story that crosses the wires has to say about the ruckus du jour, folks will seek enlightenment from the blog best placed to have inside information or true insights. Incidentally, that’s one of the main reasons I decided to set up my own specialty blog, Just Browsing, rather than continue to pen my own uninformed opinion pieces on random topics here on Peer Pressure. Yes, like this one

Well, anyone who writes a post like this is probably not that uninformed so its a voice worth hearing....but I am heartened by the view that there is a market for speciality blogs, as I totally agree with this view (and the evidence of old media is that there is lots of room for small, specialty publications).

The difference over Olde Magazine Media I think is that we will treat media like music, ie we will become fond of a number of writers in a particular space rather than one, and aggregate feeds from them, and probably use some form of social rating / recommendation system to drive attention.

Update - Saw this writeup on a new startup called Alltops, which does the exact opposite of what I'm talking about above - it aggregates all the usual A-Listers. I must be missing something, as its being pimped all over the Technet but it looks much the same to me as my RSS feedreader, never mind similar things like Netvibes. PopUrls etc - and I can choose/adjust who I see on all those, this is locked in. Mind you, seems like the people pimping it are the ones on it, and they are grouped under the term "Egos" - Is this serious or is its founder, Guy Kawasaki, just taking the p*ss