Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Rafat Ali of ContentNext Media are bringing Dickens-style drama with their Tale of Two Blogospheres. This from a recent New York Time article, PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future.

TechCrunch’s Arrington hopes to be a new John D. Rockefeller and

…create something akin to the Standard Oil Trust of bloggers.

“You have to find people who have established audience and are really really good, and you bring them all together,” he said.

ContentNext’s Ali is looking to be a new trade media company that

…offers a much more conventional vision of growth.

“Bulking up for the sake of bulking up doesn’t sound appealing to me,” he said… “We can hire two good journalists, pay them well, and build a vertical,” he said.

I’m not quite sure what it means to build a vertical, but given our own foray into the nonprofit end of the blogosphere, I’m particularly interested in these kinds of models. For example, can we have a tight network of expert bloggers writing about their faith in daily life AND a loose network of rising bloggers who have expressed interest in our mission?

Or are we trying to have our cake and eat it too?

Or am I just confusing people again like I did with that Eifelheim dialogue?

(By the way, my wife started Eifelheim and she said it really is that good. Apparently it just gets under your skin slowly. “It’s all about building mood,” she said. “Whatever. Great dialogue,” I said.)