Twitter Is Sucking Me In

I'm blogging less now that I have an outlet for my partially thought out ideas. AFAIK Twitter still lacks a good way of following spontaneous group topics of conversation. I also dislike the transience of Twitter. Perhaps that's the niche of a blog though, to capture the things that I want to be able to easy refer to later? Call me heartless, but I'd like an easy way to filter the personal life tweets out and just see the technically-oriented ones. I can moderate that by who I choose to follow, but still. Has anyone solved these issues?