Have we gone blog wild?

WHEN food blogging was new (about 15 minutes ago), it was fun to pore over the gastronomic musings at the Accidental Hedonist or I Was Just Really Very Hungry. In those days, reading about what someone ate for dinner or which food magazine they liked best was kind of amusing. But quicker than you could say blogosphere, the world of blogs-by-dedicated-foodies got crowded, repetitive, overly precious and just plain dull.

These days, hyper-focus is in; generalism is passe. A food blogger who wants to stand out from the rest of the pack has to be specialized. Really specialized. And more and more, specialization is taking the form of pinpoint devotion to an exhaustive coverage of a minusculely narrow food-related topic.

One specialized food blog attempts to cover every compelling bowl of the Vietnamese beef noodle soup pho in Southern California (though lately the author, who identifies himself only as "Diamond Dog," a male who lives in Orange County, has weighed in on phos in San Francisco, Seattle and Boston).

Another blog maps, with detailed reviews, pizza by the slice in Manhattan. There's even one that critiques every cake mix on the market.

Bacontarian (www.bacontarian.com) is a group blog about "baconism," the near-religious belief that bacon must be incorporated into every meal. It offers instructions, with photos, for how to cook a bacon-covered Thanksgiving turkey; gift ideas like bacon air freshener and bacon-shaped adhesive bandages; the story of how one of its authors, who identifies himself as Ethanz, made and served bacon tempura for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. After that entry, Ethanz concludes, "Mmm. Sacri-delicious."

Deep End Dining blogger Eddie Lin (www.deependdining.com) has committed himself to finding, eating, describing and photographing L.A.'s most challenging dishes. We find Lin, via photos and anecdotes, at various L.A. restaurants sampling German blood tongue, sea cucumber and duck fetus (a Filipino delicacy).

A video clip shows him eating still-writhing pieces of octopus. "If a picture of live, squirming tentacles is worth a thousand people feeling nauseous," he writes, "then a streaming video of the tentacles is worth a zillion vomitoriums."

Nor is there much dull material to wade through in Deep End Dining: It's what people in the blogosphere call a "slow blog," meaning that the blogger posts infrequently. In Lin's case, that means once or twice a month, whereas other bloggers typically update their sites a few times per week.