Blogs are doing a great job of covering things that were very difficult or inefficient or even impossible to cover before. They should play an integral role in making this media service more robust. But aggregation alone won't solve the problem. The focused and combined efforts of several people who think about nothing else but the market they cover will uniquely be able to identify trends, new companies, new blogs to watch, to investigate technologies or business models, to interview players in the space, etc. They can coordinate deeper professional reporting (including fact-checking) and conduct research. They can plan quality events.
The Internet business may be a niche market, but it's a big enough niche to warrant a media brand that serves it. It partially comes down to a people versus machines argument. Google News and Topix.net, for example, don't solve this problem at all. Del.icio.us and MyWeb are a bit more helpful. What I really want is for The Economist to have a dedicated and well-staffed Internet business section that also aggregates information from the right people in the Internet business community.
Always-on is very close to getting this right. The problem with the Always-on model is that too much of the coverage is from inside the industry and feels like self-promotion. There's no shortage of self-promotion amongst people in the Internet business (myself included, I'm sure). What's missing is that independent voice, the insightful mind with a view from outside who can identify the right people to listen to and the right trends to pay attention to and the right companies to learn from. I need someone to be my eyes and ears outside of my little cube and tell me what's going on in the world.
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