I wrote a post yesterday of which I'm not terribly proud.

No - not the Yoda one. I dig the Yoda one. I wish I wrote posts like that Yoda thing everyday. That was awesome. Air-five to the Yoda post.

I'm talking about the one I wrote after having taken a stroll through the BlogoSphere. It was part of a dialogue that I should have kept internal. I've gotten quite good about not posting every single one of my thoughts to Neopoleon, and I wish I hadn't let that line of thinking slip out. There was a time when I would have just thrown it up here without a thought, but I found myself getting caught up in these stupid, pointless online debates that would go on for days, sap me of energy, and make me wish I had never started blogging in the first place.

In posting about Scoble complaining, I was basically complaining, which means I was guilty of doing the thing I was accusing Scoble of doing.

Somehow, though, I feel that my reason for doing so was valid. I couldn't point out that Scoble was whining without doing a bit of complaining myself. Very unfortunate, but there you go.

One really good thing came from the post, though. It was a comment from George (I've edited the comment down a little):

Rory, Rory, Rory.

...

[There are] plenty of people out there who don't do the old link exchange and just write things because they love to write. So now set the trap and attract them all to the same place.

Create your own little slice of content heaven Mr. Blyth.

I think George is right.

I'm honestly tired of the same old blogging crap, and I've been struggling for, oh, the past year or so trying to figure out where I fit in.

I don't want to play the ass-kissing "Oh, please link to me" game that seems to get so many people excited. Life is too short, and that game's retarded.

What I want is to find other people who just really enjoy writing. That's why I put up a blog - I love to write. I didn't get into it because I wanted to raise my Technorati ranking, or because I like the technical aspect of it all. There are some people who blog just because they think it's cool that they can have blogs.

OK. Fine. Whatever.

My opinions on this stuff really began to solidify recently when I started listening to the Ricky Gervais Show podcast. It's probably the best example I've found so far of a group of genuinely talented people using technology to spread their message, rather than what I'm used to encountering in the blogging/podcasting world: People using technology to use technology.

Blogging as a medium is no longer exciting on its own. If you don't have a message beyond "Hey! Look at me! I'm a blogger! I'm blogging! Link to me!" then you're either stuck in a circa 2003 rut, or you haven't figured out yet that blogging is just another medium, and that content is ultimately the reason a medium survives. Imagine if you turned on the TV and watched a bunch of shows about TV. Pretty effing stupid, eh?

Too much of the BlogoSphere is self-referential, and it's just dull.

I can't be bothered about the A-List, or the this-list, or the that-list. I don't care if a post is tagged or uses categories. I don't care about the tech behind the syndication as long as I'm using the most popular one. The religious wars over standards, categories, tags, and so on, are for other people to worry about.

VHF vs. UHF. VHS vs. Beta.

I don't care.

The problem is that I don't know where the good writers are hanging out. And I'm not talking about the people who want to write the Great American Novel. Screw those people. I can't be bothered with that kind of crap, either.

I'm talking about people who are actually interesting. Funny. Don't take everything seriously. People who have some style.

Where are those people? I'll be the first to admit that I'm too stupid to find them. Much of my life centers around technology, but I've remained intentionally blind to the tech that would help me find the people I want to find.

Also, I want to find these people for a reason. I have a plan. It's probably a stupid plan, and it probably won't work, and I probably won't go through with it, and it'll probably turn out that I'm just having my man-period right now and my hormones are all a-twitter and it's making my hypersensitive/overly-aggressive, but I want to give this plan a shot even if it's doomed to fail.

So...

...who do you read online who is genuinely entertaining? Smart? Funny? And how can I find more of these people?