Alley Insider: Is it Lift Off?

You all remember how I posted about the launch of the Silicon Alley Insider last month? Well, since then (see the blip on July 24th below) they've certainly filled their roll by dishing "unwanted" gossip to local start-up celebs and covering NYC news with PaidContent-like thoroughness. As if the ticker and rag combo wasn't enough, folks also get Henry Blodget's business analysis, which is -- let's face it -- better 9 times out of 10 than some random blogger's musings of a Wall Street he or she has never walked down before.

Now it seems that the Insider has found its place among the blogs of record. Today on O'Reilly Radar, Nat Torkington cited Blodget's research into Google and Yahoo!'s latest 10-Ks, and a quick search on Technorati shows a host of others , including Read/Write Web, Mashable, Valley Wag, Webware and Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine turning to the publication for news leads and analysis.

So what does this all mean? Why have I been paying such close attention to this blog? Like I said in my earlier post, we need this in NYC. Long-tail and "web 2.0 compliant" (a phrase I learned in the Web 2 Expo expo hall) or not, having a paper of record is a great thing for an industry -- it's a vital part of the ecosystem I talked about in the cafeBricolage Manifesto. If these guys have what it takes to be that "paper" -- and they come at it with the right pedigree, after all -- then bravo, amen, and let's join the bandwagon.