I think you're missing the point - the reason why Arrington/TechCrunch became popular was because Michael worked his ass off to make sure that he broke tech news in his niche. He paid his dues and now he's reaping the rewards from it.

There are a lot of other bloggers who do "me too" reporting it seems, who essentially regurgitate everything they read off other sites.

I'm all for competition, I welcome the day when someone takes Arrington down a few notches - but unless people are prepared to spend the time to do the hard work, then they get absolutely no sympathy from me when they're not getting the audience that they would have liked.

You may not like the man, but you have to at least respect that he works harder than most, which is why he's at the top of the heap.

Thats my 2 cents.

Honestly this might not be a popular opinion but if I’m being honest I have to say the "revolution bloggers tried to start" was always a croc. It dismissed the fact that big news sources got where they were for a reason. That reason was that they were, at least at one time, the best at delivering information that people want.

That’s how the world works. You don’t have people checking 1,000 blogs for their news. Eventually a few of those 1,000 establish themselves as the best and they become the center of things.

Now there is a natural turn over where big sites stop being the best source for news and new sites take their place. In that process blogging did make a difference by lowering the barrier to entry. Michael Arrington started out as one guy reporting on what he found interesting and became the "blog of record" which would never have been possible in old media.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there will always be a hierarchy and every hierarchy needs someone at the top.

I don't want to discredit Mr. Arringtons efforts (which do look positively herculean), but many months ago, with posts becoming increasingly scandalous in their wording I unsubscribed from the TC feed and haven't looked back. If the stories are important enough, they generally percolate up through other channels I follow (like HN) and usually in less hyperbolic guises.

Does their success prevent other bloggers from blogging? You can't prevent the popular from being popular, but you determine the center of your own blogosphere by choosing whom you pay attention to.

I actually was thinking of the same thing earlier today. It's not just tech; I'm also involved in a fashion start up (if you can call it that) and, while there are general fashion blogs just like there are general technology blogs, there are indeed only a very few sites that most know about and check back day to day.

TechCrunch et al have created their own media brands, not exactly mainstream (though MA and company are making more and more mainstream appearances) and not exactly small time blogs. The same applies to whatever fashion blogs exist for the bit that I mentioned earlier. It's not that others are not reporting on things...they are, we just don't hear them because we don't know they exist. That's why we have sites like Hacker News and Reddit, to allow anyone to post anything interesting or newsworthy, but the general public don't exactly know about their existence. For those of us lucky enough to have access to these sites, we are already finding a lot of stuff we might not normally find. What disappoints me sometimes is that I can't get to all the good stuff that gets posted to this site if a lot of posts come successively.

Feed readers don't really seem to be the answer, though, at least not for me. Perhaps what we need is a new model. I just have no idea what.

You're trapped in too small a social circle. I suspect that less than 5% of my friends and coworkers have heard of Techcrunch or Scoble, and I work at an engineering firm. Globally, their fame is dwarfed by that of washed-up American 80's pop stars (e.g. Hall and Oates).

Admittedly, if you want news about web startups that will soon fail, they're hard to avoid, but there is no shortage of other people to pay attention to.

I think that my customers do not read TechCrunch and, accordingly, I don't think too much about them more than that.

probably because it's human nature to look for new things

those who blog every day naturally tend to have more followers

it used to be individual bloggers; however the trend is increasingly toward groups of bloggers

maybe the ultimate is site like reddit / hn (you can think the OP as a mini blog with a link)

It isn't.