The beauty of Internet publishing is that an information void vanishes overnight. The advent of blogging has accelerated this fact. Whether it be in the form of a Blog or a Web site, most topics "get covered" rapidly.

One site I am enthralled with is auctionbytes.com. Owner and editor in chief Ina Steiner does a fabulous job covering the world of online auctions from the perspective of the auction user. Check out this terrific resource!

Auctionbytes is very much the prototype of the kind of VC investing we did at internet.com in the late 1990s until 2002. The idea was to find an extremely vertical topic that would hopefully become the center of information for that topic (such as auctionbytes covering the user of auctions). Our VC model today has proved to be successful, but unfortunately certain investors and banks that provided us our money back then got cold feet and withdrew funding in mid-2002. Just the other day HowStuffWorks got the backing of billionaire Carl Icahn. Our VC fund was HowStuffWorks' first investor, back in 1999, but unfortunately we were not able to help keep it afloat in tough times when our funding was withdrawn and we lost our equity position. And so it goes --- one cannot win all the business battles.

Regardless, it is wonderful to see people like Ina Steiner making a critical success with her site. Auctionbytes illustrates how there is still a bright future for good Internet ideas.