Om Malik, a technology journalist and investor whose blog, Gigaom, which he founded in 2001, established him as one of the most important voices in Silicon Valley and helped signal a shift in how the media covered the tech industry, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 59.
An announcement on his website, Om. co, said that his death, at a hospital, came “after a long health journey with his heart. ” Mr.
Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside. com.
He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.
“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post that neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots as a search platform.
“Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging. ” By 2006, the site had 500,000 readers a month, and Technorati, a blog-tracking platform, ranked it among the 50 most influential blogs. In 2015, when Gigaom shut down, it claimed 6. 4 million monthly readers.
The emergence of blogs like Gigaom and of opinionated tech writers like Mr. Malik, Kara Swisher and Jason Kottke helped define the next iteration of technology journalism, moving it away from establishment publications and toward singular voices. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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