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business models
Zombie Business Model Revived By Hungry Blogs
Tech blog company GigaOm is starting a subscription research service to drum up cash; some think TechCrunch could soon follow. It would seem everything old in tech media is new again: Bloated dot-com magazines attempted this same tactic amid the popping of the last financial bubble. More » -
twitterati
The Twitterati Listen to Blowhard Electronica
This is the media life on Twitter: Readers daring to call on the phone, bloggers taking each other out to lunch, and blowhard predictions made about blowhard predictions! Today's Twitterati: More » -
rants
Against Realtime
The future is now, more so than ever. Silicon Valley, filled with worshipers of the new, has embraced "realtime" as the latest trend. If it didn't happen in the last 10 minutes, it doesn't matter. More » -
online advertising
The death of conversational marketing
An unproar in the world of tech blogs is uncovering a broader fault line between writers and advertisers. Om Malik's GigaOm and his other blogs have dropped their outside ad-sales firm, Federated Media, a startup run by John Battelle. Federated isn't just another ad network, nor is Battelle just another entrepreneur; he helped start Wired and The Industry Standard and an author of a book about Google, thinks that the future of marketing is conversations. And he launched Federated around that notion. Rather than shouting at readers with ads, marketers will use blogs to engage with their readers — and pay handsomely for the privilege. That's his theory, at any rate, which he is expounding in a forthcoming book. More » -
new york, minute
New York blogger worries himself sick over conflicts of interest
"If we want NYC to kick ass in the world's tech community, we have to stop favoring a few 'friends' and let everyone get time on stage." CenterNetworks founder/writer/editor Allen Stern doesn't just complain about inbreeding in New York's Web 2.0 scene, he documents it by listing the companies that presented at last night's NY Tech Meetup, and speculating on their potential conflicts of interest. Jeez, Allen, wait'll you find out I used to be on the secret MacArthur committee. Here's what we're group-thinking out here in our Valley chatroom: More » -
blogging for dollars
Om Malik Arrington-proofs his blogs with $4.5 million funding
The founder of the GigaOm blog network isn't one of those guys who just wants to write, write, write. Om Malik, who reported on Valley VCs for Red Herring and Forbes in the '90s, is now on his second stint as a venture capitalist. His announcement this morning of a $4.5 million round of investment led by Palo Alto-based Alloy Ventures isn't aimed at readers, but at competing blog businessmen — specifically TechCrunch owner Mike Arrington. Malik's message: Kiss your dreams of owning me goodbye. More » -
great moments in journalism
In today's news, I met Al Gore!
GigaOm's Om Malik and Mashable's Pete Cashmore like to present themselves as leaders of a new kind of Web 2.0 journalism. Both turned up at Current TV's offices Friday, ostensibly to cover Current's Twitter-enhanced coverage of the first Presidential debate. Truth is, Current's publicists had called reporters to tip us off that executive chairman of the board Al Gore would be there. Gore didn't bother to use Twitter himself — he didn't even stick around for the debate. But he did take time to pose for photos. More » -
om malik
VC reporter finally joins the team
No one's surprised that GigaOm founder-and-whatever-else Om Malik has joined True Ventures as a partner. Or that he buried the news near the bottom of a lengthy blog post last week. Or that it took days for reporters to discover the blog post, with its classically obscure Malikian headline, "Evolving My Work Life." The New York Times felt obligated to quote a journalism ethics prof on the potential conflict of Om being both a Valley VC and a reporter on Valley VCs. But let's be honest about the Valley's take: No one cares. Like fellow reporters-turned-moneymen Michael Moritz and Stewart Alsop, Malik will finally, finally be taken seriously by the people he's been following for years. (Photo by Brian Solis) -
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great moments in pr
Google founders celebrate anniversary by ignoring "the little people"
The tenth anniversary festivities for search engine-turned-advertising company Google are in full swing, but don't expect the founders to invite all their old friends to the party in Greece. Tech blogger Om Malik hasn't heard from the original team in over a decade. It's another sign that the Valley has gone Hollywood. I'm reminded of a friend I met at a downtown L.A. hotel last year who complained that uncannily beautiful actor Adrian Grenier hadn't called since he'd achieved a little notoriety on HBO's Entourage. Imagine how you could treat old friends with a $140 billion market capitalization. [GigaOm] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma) -
quotable
Yahoo plagued by "systematic rot" says Om Malik
Almost every technology and business publication, including Valleywag, has been all Yahoo, all the time. Between the Microsoft merger talks, proxy board battle with Carl Icahn and employees leaving nearly every day, there's been lots of deliciously bad news to report. However, my old boss Om Malik over at GigaOm has been fairly quiet on the issue. One reason why is because a lot of his sources at the company have probably left, which is good for them but bad for a good reporter. Today, however, he weighed in with his analysis. More » -
superficial
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. More » -
Web Worker Daily
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 » -
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
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 » -
blogging for dollars
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
Om Malik throws a soiree
On Thursday, Om Malik is going to make a big announcement about GigaOm, his tech blog network. How do we know this? Because he'scancelledstill throwing a swanky party to be held this Wednesday at San Francisco's De Young Museum and briefing journalists afterwards. (Update: Turns out the party's still on. Personal to Om: Dude, my invitation appears to have been lost in the mail. Ahem.) Which partner is Malik announcing a deal with? Not Time Inc., apparently. Malik, a former senior writer at Time Inc.'s Business 2.0 magazine, held acquisition talks with his former employer a few months ago, but they went nowhere. (Vivek Shah, the newly appointed head of Time Inc.'s business publications, even joked about it with Malik when they ran into each other at Fortune's iMeme conference.) I gave Om a buzz, but he couldn't talk when I reached him. I'll update when I know more. -
feuds
Om Malik's fishy hires
For Earth2Tech, the new green blog from GigaOm, founder Om Malik has hired Adena DeMonte away from the Red Herring, the struggling publication we've put on a deathwatch. That's got to be the last straw for Herring editor Joel Dreyfuss (pictured, right). Rumor has it that Dreyfuss at one point told Malik to stop poaching the Herring's best writers. Malik, of course, is a former Herring writer, but the publication in its current form and under current management bears no relationship, aside from the name, to the storied tech magazine Malik worked for earlier in this decade. Why Dreyfuss feels Malik's not entitled to fish in his pond is a mystery to me — unless it's just a sign of his general frustration with trying to bail out a sinking ship. -
blogging for dollars
Om Malik's green period
Om Malik, the moody tech blogger behind GigaOm, is better known for his blue periods. But now he's entering a green phase with his new environmental blog, Earth2Tech. His heart's hardly in it, however. In sending around a note announcing the site, all he could manage was this: "Apparently like everyone else, we are going green!" For those who know Malik, that's his slightly chagrined way of admitting he's following a trend, not setting one. While it may not attract much excitement from its creator, it's sure to pull in those green ad dollars. (Side note: GigaOm contributor and Earth2Tech lead writer Katie Fehrenbacher is the sister of Jill Fehrenbacher, who in turn is Engadget founder Peter Rojas's girlfriend.) -
party report
Pownce founders party in pot-laden pleasure palace
MEGAN MCCARTHY — "Pownce is the new pink," declared Valleywag's capricious new editor Owen Thomas in assigning me to go cover a party thrown by Leah Culver and Kevin Rose, cofounders of Digg. The new pink? More like the new pot. The microblogging site, which people use to send around URLs, MP3s, and updates on their lives, is just as coveted — invitations are still up for sale on eBay — and seems to leave its users just as unproductive. So what better place to hold a party than a pink castle of a house in the Castro owned by Dennis Peron, one of the heads of California's medical marijuana movement? A list of Internet-glamorous attendees, a crime scene, and a photo gallery, after the jump. More » -
silicon valley users guide
SVUG #9: How do I get invited to the right parties?
PAUL BOUTIN — Unless you pull a YouTube in the next six months, you won't get asked to Sun Valley by July. Instead, aim for Mike Arrington's next Atherton bash. Follow our 3-step plan and stick to your story: Valleywag? I've never heard of it. More » -
microsoft
Behind the deal: Microsoft's payment to Universal Music is not protection money
Microsoft agreed to pay Universal Music over a dollar for each Zune it sells — and that's all the bloggers and commentators will report. But the New York Times, which broke this news, explains the payment is part of a deal in which Universal will license its music to Microsoft's new music download service. More » -
gigaom
Megan reports on Om Malik's Widgets Live Con
Valleywag writer Megan McCarthy IMed me from today's Widgets Live conference, the first con held by blog network GigaOM: "This conference would be so much more exciting if it were about midgets." Later, we chatted about the event: More » -
om malik
Poll: What's more likely, pig wings, hell frozen, or YouTube selling?
The tech blog GigaOM, pretending that either Facebook or YouTube has a snow job's hope in hell of tricking a company into buying them, asked readers which company would sell first. So Valleywag is running a poll with options equally likely to Yahoo buying Facebook or anyone buying YouTube:
More » -
hewlett-packard
Loose wires: You enter a maze of twisty startups, all alike
- BusinessWeek reports on the Hewlett-Packard leak probe and ensuing scandal: "The HP board will meet on Sunday. The company declined to say if this is an emergency meeting of directors to discuss the fallout from the probe." Right, they decided to meet on Sunday for no particular reason. Just for brunch, actually! Mimosas! WE'RE ALL GOOD FRIENDS HERE. [BusinessWeek]
- Blogger Rick Abruzzo writes the stats sheet for a Net Neutral. Skills and items include Ring of Michael Arrington ("Can cast Shit Into Sunshine, once per day") and All Your Mace Are Belong To Us. [Supr.c.ilio.us]
- Nothing snarky to say about GigaOM blogger Liz Gannes's profile of the Slim Devices, makers of the Squeezebox music player. I just like the article. [GigaOM]
- Fox Interactive head Ross Levinsohn would tell new players in the Internet market, "Don't copy the original; be authentic." Or, like Ross, buy the original. [AlwaysOn]
- A secondhand guide to Digg's story-promotion algorithm shows it's really complex, harder to game than you'd think, and probably ugly as sin on the backend. [MarketingShift]
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launches
GigaOM's WebWorkerDaily: For the digital nomad who has everything but a place to call work
The basis of Web Worker Daily, GigaOM blog kingpin Om Malik's latest title, is that in an increasingly web-based, wireless world, with bloggers and web workers dispersed in diverse geographic pockets, it's becoming more difficult to mobilize the workforce. The site, which launched on Labor Day (cute timing, Om), is meant as a forum in which "2.0 users" share knowledge of technological systems and workspaces. More » -
om malik
These three bloggers want to get you a job
Takeaway: Several big tech bloggers recently launched job boards. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has the best board, but his competitors rejected his partnership offers, fearing he'd take over the partnership. More » -
techcrunch
Pop goes the weasel: When Web 2.0 bombs, these blogs could die
When the little dot-coms blow up, says marketing/PR blogger Steve Rubel, the sites funded by their advertising will go under too. Rubel names social news site Digg as one potential victim. How does it stack up against other Web-2.0-supported sites? Above the fold, we analyze Digg and tech blog GigaOM. Below, GigaOM competitor TechCrunch sets off a red alert. More » -
google
Loose wires: Captain's LiveJournal
- Captain's LiveJournal 060817: Detecting peanuts-for-brains life form over at Planet Google's holodeck where a semblance of a joke is being made. Must inquire more about this blog structure and why humans look so self-satisfied after hitting "publish." [Google Blog]
- Marketing blogger Seth Godin lists the top 900 or so Web 2.0 "It" Companies. We suppose, judging by their ranking, that MySpace will now endorse the shameless self-promoter too. [Web 2.0 Traffic Watch]
- The good people at Kiko do a post-mortem on their little calendar company and conclude what the rest of us already knew: Nobody does Ajax calendars better than them except Google, 30boxes, Calendar hub, and nearly a dozen other companies. [Jkanstyle]
- Not to be outdone by Om Malik, Michael Arrington's blog TechCrunch is hosting another shindig tomorrow nite. Invites are so hot (or lame) they are being auctioned off on Ebay. Nothing is Paris-Hilton-hotter than us raising the odds that nudity will transpire. Let's just hope none of the party-goers have to bear witness to an Arrington full frontal. [SF Tech Chronicles]





























