A few months ago Mercury News reporters Matt Marshall and Michael Bazeley teamed up to launch SiliconBeat, a blog aiming to capture inside news about tech innovation in the Valley and “the money that drives it.”   I think it’s safe to say that unlike most blogs, where over time you build street credit and grow an audience, SiliconBeat landed squarely on the radar of every VC, every tech startup and every Internet company in the area — from arguably the moment of its inception.

Obviously a big factor driving SiliconBeat’s success is the near-instant credibility Matt and Mike bring from the print world to the online world, but it still begs the question: Matt already has a great “platform” for writing about the investing scene via his venture capital columns, likewise, Mike has his Internet business column, why do they blog?

I recently asked one SiliconBeater (um, yeah, that just sounds terrible) to share his thoughts, here’s what Mike said:

I blog because the media landscape is shifting - very rapidly - and as a media professional, I need to move with it.

I cover the Internet, and my readers and the people I write about get a lot of their information from the Web. So I’m doing myself (and them, I’d like to believe) a disservice if I lock myself and my reporting inside of a print publication. Of course, the Mercury News has published online for years. But as the media landscape becomes more fragmented, I believe we should exploit all the platforms that exist, when we can. I feel like Matt and I are reaching a new audience (or keeping an old one, perhaps?) with the blog.

On a purely practical level, blogging gives me an outlet for news and information that wouldn’t always find a place in the newspaper. And it’s a more flexible medium, in that I can write short or long as I see fit.

More personally, I find blogging to be exhilarating in many ways. I appreciate the ability to publish 24/7, the freedom of a different publishing format, and the closer connection I feel to readers. Though it’s been around for some time now, I still marvel at the genius behind trackback and the threads it creates between web sites and online conversations. And of course, the immediate feedback you get through comments is nice.

Also, as any individual blogger or web site owner will tell you, being able to track your readership through the user logs and search engines such as Technorati and Feedster is a bonus.

I would encourage any company swimming in the pools that Matt and Mike follow to subscribe to SiliconBeat now (RSS feed) - in the short term, following their stuff will give you a raw perspective on the tech Valley scene (what’s hot, what’s not), and in the long-run it’ll only make you smarter with respect to understanding how companies and technologies in this space are evolving…

– Mike Manuel