Goodbye, Gigaom

Gigaom, one of the best and most pioneering tech blogs, has turned off the lights, probably for good.

Its founder, Om Malik, one of the most respected reporters and analysts in Silicon Valley, poured his life into his eponymous venture. I mean this almost literally — Malik had to moderate his punishing work schedule after a heart attack. By all accounts he is a very nice and generous person. I only met him once at a tech conference, and I was struck that he knew my work as a just-starting tech reporter. Malik will do well. Indeed, he had already moved on to become a partner with the VC firm True Ventures.

Gigaom was the kind of media venture that all of us should want to see succeed.

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It eschewed clickbait and the mindless race to cover the latest app, preferring instead to focus on less sexy but very important facets of the technology world, such as enterprise software, networking, cloud computing, data analytics, and so on.

When I covered technology for a living, I knew that if I wanted the Silicon Valley "buzz," I would have to go to Techmeme, the tech blog aggregator. If, on the other hand, I wanted serious analysis on easy-to-miss stuff, Gigaom was a necessary daily read.

I also wanted Gigaom to succeed for business reasons. Gigaom tried to become not just a media company, but also a research company, offering a subscription research service. As someone who helped start a similar service, I looked up to Gigaom. As someone who wants to see media businesses thrive in the 21st century, I wanted this business model to succeed. And they were aggressive, too: Their research product was low-priced, trying to bank on network effects. You didn't just access reports, at least in theory, you accessed a social network of top Silicon Valley analysts. It was an ambitious vision I've long admired. Evidently, it didn't take off. I still believe in the potential of "mediata," but it is sad to see a pioneer go.

But mostly, Gigaom was a familiar feature in the tech media landscape, something you thought would always be there because it just made sense that something like that ought to exist.

Writing — yes, even tech blogs — is one of the ways we build this thing called civilization. It's always sad to see a member leave us.