I'm not sure if “everyone” should cover the biggest stories; I'm not really convinced either way. Personally, I try to write about stories that I feel I have something to contribute to. Sometimes that will be a hot story on techmeme, and other times not. In fact, I like doing a mix.

But everyone's different, every website and blog is different, with different goals and metrics for success and so on.

And just to reiterate my original point: there's always going to be LOTS of coverage (whether it's “over” or or just on the money) of big stories, so what I find interesting are the platforms and services and networks that are helping people to make sense of it all.

I also think that overcoverage should be defined differently. As I said, that initial story was huge, and SHOULD be rightly covered by everyone. To really view overcoverage, though, following Techmeme snapshots over the next 72 hours would have been more telling (and made a better point I think) in the number of blogs that repeatedly appeared there beating the horse to death. You'd find that we had one article in that first burst, but none following, because there was other news to be looking at, and I'd already expressed my opinions rather than drag them out over three days of over-analyzing and reporting every sneeze out of either party.

And I don't disagree with any of that. I would simply second Scott's call to “be original,” to essentially create valuable content that doesn't waste online space or readers' time. And secondly, I'd argue that smart aggregators and smart people networks are increasingly important in helping to sort out what's important, what's unique, what's special, what's valuable, and so on.