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GigaOm's Om Malik tries out a new look
I can report that Om Malik, the blogfather behind GigaOm and Giga Omnimedia's stable of sites like NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, OStatic and Web Worker Daily (which I like to call, collectively, "the Ompire") has been doing well since suffering a heart attack at the end of last year. He's also scaled back what little excess there was in his workaholic lifestyle, and while he promised he wouldn't be changing his avatar, he's done just that — getting rid of the cigar, the fedora and the argyle sweater for a warm gaze and new media-blue shirt.Simple food, simple clothes, a simple home and simple, clear writing. Hopefully I can stick to that plan. I have incorporated physical exercise into my daily life, given up smoking, gone almost completely vegetarian and taken to wearing jeans.More »
There's no such thing as bad publicity, but over such a boring blog post?
Jason Harris, a freelancer for GigaOm's Web Worker Daily site, was caught plagiarizing an article about Gmail. The truly sad part: This is the first time we've heard someone mention Web Worker Daily in months. [Regret the Error]
online video
NewTeeVee Station launches, tracking Web-video contagion
The plague of viral video has an epidemiologist: NewTeeVee Station, a spinoff of GigaOm's NewTeeVee, a blog which tracks the online-video industry. "Basically, we think this online video stuff is more and more legit," NewTeeVee editor Liz Gannes IM'd me earlier today. "We are betting on that, and treating it like a real entertainment medium." Liz Shannon Miller, pictured, will edit NewTeeVee Station's reviews of popular videos. First up: YouTube sensation Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance." More importantly than just describing the videos, the site will track who made the videos, who appeared in them, who funded them, and whether they profited. (Laipply, for example, hasn't made money off YouTube, but he did get on Oprah.)
jackpot
John Battelle takes $22 million in fuck-you money
Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million. More »
1:00 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Owen Thomas
3,525 views,
4 comments
Latest by n/a: Word on the street is, he'll lose most of that in one incredibly bad hand of poker at a suitcase gambling stand by Capitola beach. more »
loser-generated content
Om Malik surrenders to his commenters
"I have often said that the real value of blogs lies in the intelligence embedded in the comments." — Om Malik, on blog-comments software maker Disqus's new round of venture capital. True enough for GigaOm, I suppose. [GigaOm]
blogging for dollars
Om Malik, workaholic
From his hospital bed, stricken GigaOm blogger Om Malik posts an update on his health after he suffered a heart attack last month. And he manages to work in a review of a new voicemail-transcription service into the blog entry. Any questions on how he landed in the hospital in the first place? The man never stops working.
gigaom
Blogger Om Malik could never have predicted he'd have a heart attack at the age of 41. But he did foresee one thing clearly: He would never build a business on a single blog so closely identified with one author. His spinoff blogs — Web Worker Daily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, and FoundRead — have not matched GigaOm's success; of the four, only NewTeeVee, in my opinion, shows promise of being a breakout hit like the original. But unlike Michael Arrington, who built TechCrunch solely on his startup cult of personality, Malik has sought to diversify his media startup in a way that it can survive him. Until December 28, this was merely wise in theory.
Om Malik's smart move
Blogger Om Malik could never have predicted he'd have a heart attack at the age of 41. But he did foresee one thing clearly: He would never build a business on a single blog so closely identified with one author. His spinoff blogs — Web Worker Daily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, and FoundRead — have not matched GigaOm's success; of the four, only NewTeeVee, in my opinion, shows promise of being a breakout hit like the original. But unlike Michael Arrington, who built TechCrunch solely on his startup cult of personality, Malik has sought to diversify his media startup in a way that it can survive him. Until December 28, this was merely wise in theory.
blogging for dollars
Om Malik recovering from heart attack
No laughing matter: GigaOm blogger Om Malik reports that he had a heart attack last week at the age of 41. At Business 2.0, where we both worked before going blog, Malik and I teased each other constantly about our weight. At one point, he and I lined up with two other rotund members of the staff for a photo. The four of us totaled nearly half a ton. The photo was meant to kick off a weight-loss contest that never really happened. The origins of the name GigaOm, in fact, were not in broadband, but in a broad waist. As Malik has told many friends, his mom gave him the nickname when he returned to India enlarged by his sojourns in the West. I say this not to make light of the situation, but to hammer home a point as serious as an infarction: Maintaining your wetware requires a large portion of your bandwidth. Best wishes for a fast recovery, Om. (Photo by zippy)
blogging for dollars
Unknown VOIP service a failure, says GigaOm
An actual headline from Om Malik at GigaOm today: "Like Gaboogie, Foonz Losing Its Voice Too." The extra "too" really clears things up, doesn't it? TechCrunch picked up the story with a sardonic cliche: "News flash. There's just no money in giving people free calls." The actual news flash: There's just no money in drawing conclusions about technology from the failures of startups no one has even heard of.
stats
Half you dorks are online right now
Visits and page views to Valleywag were about 50 percent of a normal weekday both yesterday and today, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As the guy at Tully's Coffee said, "Any day that half your clientele shows up at the door is a business day." With half the Net still going at it (see chart: Most of our traffic comes from people clicking links), it's kind of weird to see the go-go business blogs — TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat — shuttered for the day. Couldn't you guys have queued something up? The old-media dinosaurs at the NYT managed to print an issue, even if it's padded with heartwarming holiday filler. I'm starting to think the Objectivists are right: The problem with Christmas is it's not commercialized enough. Whoops, update: Duncan at TechCrunch just posted some actual news, but it's already late Wednesday morning for him in Australia.
hulu
A gift for our dear readers: 10,000 Hulu Invites
I saw a theme this morning as I perused the various other tech sites: Hulu invites! Hulu, the video-streaming partnership between News Corp. and NBC, is throwing open its doors to many early adopters by offering up thousands of invites on several tech sites. If you haven't gotten a chance to play around with Hulu and want to see just what the hell Paul Boutin is complaining about, here's your chance. GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Mashable are giving away 2,500 invites each. All, we note, are clients of Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network. Coincidence, conspiracy, or just part of a future Hulu advertising campaign?
quincy smith
CBS Web chief bored when not buying startups
WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — In an interview with former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, Quincy Smith, the frenetically dealmaking CBS Web chief, looks so bored. So bored. As Quittner rambles on with a long, involved tale about his mancrush on awesomely geeky GigaOm blogger Om Malik, Smith is scanning the audience and jotting down notes, as if he's plotting, mid-panel, which startups he's going to buy at the show.
crash this bash
Om Malik stays in (and out of) the picture
A double birthday party for GigaOm biz-blogger Om Malik (pictured with operations manager Joey Wan) and Spark PR founder Donna Sokolsky fogged up the glass patio walls at Jack Falstaff on Friday. I happened to be at the bar, hoping to catch dreamy god-mayor Gavin Newsom doing paperwork again. After the jump, the best overheards. More »
morgan webb
Horny Michael Arrington's new lust object
blogging for dollars
Blogs continue to sell — but blog valuations are staying modest. Discovery Communications, the cable-and-online media company, has bought enviro blog TreeHugger for a reported $10 million. With nearly 2 million unique visitors, that means Discovery paid a very modest $5 per "eyeball" — the unpleasant online-advertising slang for a reader. Contrast that to the bubbly hopes of GigaOm's Om Malik back in 2005, when he wrote about the "return of monetized eyeballs" for Business 2.0. (Full disclosure: I helped him crunch the numbers for that story.) More »
Discovery splashes a green $10 million on TreeHugger
Blogs continue to sell — but blog valuations are staying modest. Discovery Communications, the cable-and-online media company, has bought enviro blog TreeHugger for a reported $10 million. With nearly 2 million unique visitors, that means Discovery paid a very modest $5 per "eyeball" — the unpleasant online-advertising slang for a reader. Contrast that to the bubbly hopes of GigaOm's Om Malik back in 2005, when he wrote about the "return of monetized eyeballs" for Business 2.0. (Full disclosure: I helped him crunch the numbers for that story.) More »
online video
Get ready for GigaOm TV
We asked, and Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com helpfully answered: Om Malik is launching a television show with Revision3, the online-video site cofounded by Digg's Kevin Rose and now run by Jim Louderback, theman who made a well-timed exit from PC magazine. The deal was thinly disguised, since Revision3's PR firm was the one to send out invites for a party Malik's holding tonight to celebrate the deal. The result of the partnership is called "The GigaOm Show," and will cover many of the same personalities who pop up in Malik's GigaOm blog. But now, here's the question that Swisher didn't ask — and should have. More »
rumormonger
