Another day, another journo-gone-blogger

So Matt Marshall got off to a rough start today . Despite what I’m sure were careful preparations for launch, the lights never turned on at his new blog VentureBeat (or if they did, I blinked and missed them.)

Some 16 hours or so after launch the site still remains dead. Anyway, I’m sure this is but a minor blip in what will otherwise be I’m sure a glorious blogging endeavor. Who knows, it could even go down as some Silicon Valley lore someday as the auspicious beginning to a media empire that will someday will rule the world….or something.

So not that I’m keeping count, but that is now Dan Gillmor , Tom Foremski, and Om Malik who have left comfy jobs with publications to start their own blogs. I’m sure there are a bunch more that I’m missing.

Dan’s the director at the Center for Citizen Media and will soon be hawking the paperback of his book; Tom’s got a couple of other blogging gigs with ZDNet and “Friday’s with Foremski” with the Chron; and Om still has his column with Biz2.0 and he’s venture backed.

So they all have side jobs, as well as job boards.

So other than his blog, I’m wondering what else Matt has up his sleeve. I guess his servers are going to keep me wondering.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got an enormous amount of respect for all of these guys. They’ve rightly earned the title “entrepreneur” and they are trying to remake one dog-of-a-business, the media business. From a media and cultural studies point-of-view, they are the way of the future.

My question remains, however, are they the way for the future from a business point-of-view.

Yes, I know TechCrunch is making gobs of money. I saw the article in Biz2.0 as well. But I’m still wondering if there is a sustainable, repeatable business model around these blogs.

(Arrington, however, seems to have no interest in sustainable business models and is waiting for all the other schmoes to go down.)

Also, what’s the market size? Can the market support a bunch of stand-alone blogs that are all (broadly speaking) in the same space?

Reading what these guys write is always interesting. Seeing how this stand-alone tech blog market plays out will be even more so.