All Things Digital

Perhaps the only blogger who would have had the exact right take on this somewhat silly Scobleicious day of data portability debates is Om Malik.

Unfortunately for us and mostly for him, he has been sidelined by a sudden heart attack he suffered over the holidays that landed him in the hospital (in fact, Om actually walked himself there, so that is a good sign). According to a blog post he made earlier in the day, that’s where he has been camped out now as he recovers and contemplates a life without fried foods and stress.

The latter might be a little hard for Om, who is probably the hardest-working man in the tech-blog business and on whom I egregiously patterned my own journey into the online-content medium.

Of course, I did, given that Om combines dogged reporting with analytical savvy and typically exacting standards he gleaned from a life in mainstream journalism. He is also a genuine character with an important definitive voice.

We all looked at Om as a real trailblazer when he struck out from the relative safety of a traditional magazine job to move into a still-nascent Internet space, a journey that continues to this day with his interesting expansion of the GigaOm brand into all sorts of related digital arenas like the excellent NewTeeVee and Earth2Tech.

Of course, Om is still the big show and he scooped everyone with the news about his illness in the typical pugnacious but sweet-natured style that I really admire.

“With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK,” he wrote. “Now living a healthier life isn’t just one of my New Year’s resolutions, it’s doctor’s orders. Friends and family have purged my apartment of smokes, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods–I am even going to be drinking decaf. I won’t be refashioning my avatar’s stogie with a celery stick, but I will be taking better care of my health.”

While I am glad the cigar is still there–unlit, Om, or else you have me to answer to and you know who will win that fight–please take care and get better soon. The tech Web is a lot less interesting without you.

I know you need a brief break from my relentless obsession with Yahoo, so here is an intro video I did on the fly for an event thrown by Om Malik’s NewTeeVee Web site last night on Pier 38 in San Francisco.

I will post more tomorrow on the event, which was part of a series of outdoor showings of online videos. This time the theme was “Citizen News,” and I and others had to judge a half-dozen videos culled from submissions.

Of course, I also had to submit a video intro about me, so this is what I made, complete with a tour of the AllThingsD.com Global HQ (in the cottage behind my house), with a special guest star, too!

Here you go:

In this post on his NewTeeVee site, Om Malik said organizers of the still-in-the-planning-stages joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. are making the rounds, trying to raise $100 million for the online video service designed to counter the growing power of YouTube.

That puts the valuation of the still-unnamed project at $1 billion.

Is it worth that much?

Hmm. Let me think. Hmm.

No.