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In a downtown Chelsea apartment/office, Hylton Jolliffe is up before dawn everyday, scouring technology news sites to update his newly-launched Corante Weblog.

Jolliffe, a newshound who helped get AsiaSource off the ground, wants to make Corante the start-up page of choice for industry professionals. He believes there is money to be made by acting as an "intelligent intermediary" to sift through the overwhelming sea of daily news articles.

And, taking a personalized approach to presenting the logs, Jolliffe may be on to something. Corante's Webloggers are mostly freelance experts/journalists, lending a sense of professionalism to the niche topics that are edited and packaged daily. An early-morning e-mail newsletter helps drive traffic and readers to the Corante site.

Jolliffe has already landed a deal to provide news logs to wireless content play Unstrung.com and partnerships with other businesses are in the works, he says.

In between scouring, editing and updating the site, Jolliffe chatted with atNewYork about the Corante concept, the business of Weblogging, the paid vs. free debate and the state of the content industry.

Q: At first glance, Corante is basically a Weblog, much like Newslinx.com, LostRemote.com or IwantMedia.com. What differentiates Corante from those sites?

What we're trying to provide is a service for time-starved industry professionals who need to get a quick read on their respective sectors and don't have the time to surf from site to site for the one or two articles they're interested in or don't have the time to follow a link to a site before figuring out if it's even something they're interested in the first place.

So we're a service staffed by experts in their respective fields who do the work for you, finding and pointing to the articles that matter regardless of source and providing the context and perspective decision-makers need to better understand developments and how they interrelate.

We align our coverage into eight categories - venture capital, e-business, e-commerce, personal technology, bio-technology, communications, law & policy and marketing & advertising - and will be adding several more in the next few months such as media and infrastructure to round out our coverage.

Q: With the online advertising market in the dumps, it's a tough time to be betting on a content-oriented play. How exactly will Corante make money?

Yes, it's a tough time for advertising but we believe things will eventually improve and that our targeted coverage will ultimately appeal to advertisers and strategic partners. But we also have three or four other revenue streams including syndication which we see as a more viable business in the near term as we build our audience and wait for the advertising climate to change. So the bulk of our revenues out of the gate will come from content licensing, private label services and customized offerings.

Already, we've secured a deal with wireless news site Unstrung.com to provide content for them and we're on the verge of signing a similar deal with a well-known technology consulting firm and have been happily surprised by companies' interest in redistributing our coverage to their employees.

Q: Where do you stand on the free vs. paid content conundrum?

That's an interesting issue that we're of course following closely. Ideally we can continue to deliver our content for free. We've already had a few indications that our users might be willing to pay a modest subscription fee so that's heartening.

But again, I hope our other revenue streams enable us to continue to offer the core service for free. It's obviously a critical issue for online publishers as these business models evolve and consumers too have to adjust to the new realities of getting the information they need. Which is why I think the more mission critical and niche-oriented one can be, in the content they deliver, the better.

It's been the general trend in media and as much as I love general interest magazines and websites I think they're a harder business to be in.

Q: Corante? Where did you come up with that name?

The name's kind of neat. It's actually the name of the first English language newspaper in history - published in London in 1621 by the British printer Nathaniel Butter. So in tech lingo we're Corante 2.0, a couple hundred years later...