All Things Digital

Earlier this week, I had my good friend and longtime friendly rival New York Times reporter Matt Richtel and his wife to our house for dinner, where conversation turned to his controversial article about the health dangers of blogging.

“Ouch,” said Richtel about the reaction to the piece.

After its appearance in the Times, Richtel (pictured here) got flamed all over the Web by bloggers and mainstream media types alike.

His offense? Using two recent blogger deaths and a heart attack of another blogger, Om Malik (also at our dinner), as the whisper-thin thread he hung his story on.

Actually, Richtel did have a lot of caveats in the piece, whose first problem was probably its very inflammatory title, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop,” along with an admittedly purplish lede:

“They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece–not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.”

Well, I, for one, am pretty exhausted since I started blogging almost a year ago. But I am blaming that on my two sons, aged 3 and 6, whose perpetual-motion-machine energy is hard to keep up with at my advanced age.

A trend! Old-lady mothers of small boys who blog, attend a never-ending Little League game and never sleep! Get on it, Matt (who will know this cycle well soon enough–congrats)!

In any case, I think you pretty much have to give big mainstream media companies a semi-annual pass on three-examples-is-a-trend stories they so love.

And, at the very least, Richtel’s piece did result in some funny videos.

Like this one from BarelyPolitical.com (best known for foisting Obama Girl on the world), a comic investigative piece on blogger sweatshops:

For those heading into the weekend, don’t miss this post from tech blogger Om Malik (pictured here, but the cigar is now a thing of the past), assessing his life and work three months after he suffered a serious heart attack.

Titled “Off Topic: What the Past Three Months Have Taught Me,” it is actually quite on topic for anyone who works a bit too hard and is a bit too connected (that would be everyone reading this right now).

While Malik has changed the obvious things–no more smoking, less meat-eating and adding exercise into his daily life–he notes that it is more the “little things that have proved to be a challenge.”

Because he is a true geek, Malik reaches for tech metaphors when trying to describe the state of his new being, comparing himself to a MacBook Air.

Not the sleek and thin part, but because “the Macbook Air comes with [a] minuscule amount of storage space, so one needs to be careful about how to use it. The machine’s battery power limitations remind me of how much time I have to devote to work on a daily basis.”

Thus, gone from Malik’s hard drive: excessive public appearances, too much travel and too many RSS feeds.

In addition, he realized something my grandmother always used to tell me: There are no indispensable people. Even if your blog is called GigaOm.

Through his experience, Malik said he learned to rely on his team more and stopped micromanaging. “You empower people, and in turn they power you to do good things,” he wrote.

And perhaps most important of all for those who live in the pressure cooker of Silicon Valley: Get a cardiac heart check-up now.

Here’s the most recent GigaOm show without Om! But, in the latest episode of the GigaOm Show on Revision3, Liz Gannes and Joyce Kim do a good job interviewing John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla.

I spent some time with Lilly at a conference in Hawaii last year (I know, boondoggle!) on a scavenger hunt team and can attest to the fact that he is as smart as he seems here in this video about the future of the open-source browser company.

Walt Mossberg and I had a lovely visit with Om Malik yesterday, a get-well-soon summit held at a Starbucks in San Francisco’s Financial District. It was the first time I have seen the well-liked tech blogger of GigaOm fame since he suffered a heart attack during the holidays.

Malik, who will not be smoking cigars any longer as he is pictured here, is newly out of the hospital and in rest-and-recovery mode.

While not ready to subject himself to the withering annoyance of BoomTown’s video–and don’t think I did not ask!–I can report that Malik looked quite spry and as relaxed as one can be, given the circumstances.

Everyone at AllThingsD.com wishes him well and looks forward to his quick and successful recuperation.

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.

Yes, indeedy, this is about as insider as you get in Silicon Valley. But we are just addled enough by all the spiked eggnog we drank this weekend to think you might be interested in this video we did at a variety of industry holiday parties BoomTown attended.

They include a stop at angel investor Ron Conway’s Pacific Heights (San Francisco) apartment, where we talked to Ron, entertainer and entrepreneur MC Hammer, blogger Om Malik and The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney.

Then, a visit to investor Ram Shriram’s home in Woodside, Calif., where VC James Joaquin and YouTube’s Chad Hurley are harangued by our Flip camera.

And also, a sojourn at the downtown San Francisco abode of Google’s Marissa Mayer, where we interfaced with her, as well as Google’s Sergey Brin, WSJ’s Rob Guth and, yes, someone we can only call Hot Santa.

No surprise, but BoomTown just could not resist that one.

Here’s the video:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

So, Mark Zuckerberg apologized.

Yes, he took too long to do it. Yes, he was dumb to release a product, Beacon, without thinking through the potential privacy implications. Yes, it was a big black eye for the Facebook founder.

But good for him.

While some are arguing that no one but the press and privacy advocates cared about the whole controversy around the ad system that can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed, it was only bound to get uglier out there.

So Zuckerberg, as he had before on news feeds, correctly calculated that it was time to eat crow. “I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better,” he wrote in a blog post today on the topic.

We knew that was coming, didn’t we?

Read more »

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is the guest on the GigaOm Show on Revision3 this week.

Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interview Wales, who has also founded Wikia and whose thoughts always interest us.

Here you go:

Om Malik’s popular tech site, GigaOm, unveiled a handsome new look.

Here’s a partial image of the site–click on the image to make it larger.

We have also been lax in posting new episodes of the GigaOm Show on Revision3, which Malik co-hosts with Joyce Kim.

Here is the latest one with Jim Greer of Kongregate and Jameson Hsu of Mochi Media, talking about monetizing casual games.

However we missed a week of posting the GigaOm Show on Revision3 escapes us–it had something to do with tequila and Britney Spears, but we are foggy on the exact details.

Nonetheless, here are two for the price of one (and, by price, we mean free) for your techie enjoyment.

Last month, Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interviewed a bunch of folks while attending the TechCrunch40 conference, including the tracksuit-wearing, shaved-head-sporting Marc Andreessen (don’t get us wrong, we like the look). Also, extreme wonkery with Engadget guys and Chris Anderson of Wired on his book-worthy newest theory.

Then, it’s onto Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s go-to guy in Silicon Valley.

I have always thought Lewin was quite a charmer comparatively speaking (to most at Microsoft, that is, and not bad in general).

Watch carefully, as he is working as hard as he can to brush off the GoogleFacebookYouTube mindshare monster. Also, Lewin says exactly zero about Microsoft’s intentions toward Facebook.

Is it just me or does it seem exactly one million years ago when Microsoft was considered the scary Bigfoot?

So Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick, in his weigh-in on Facebook’s potential shakedown of Bill Gates’s wallet–as reported, Microsoft is apparently thinking of investing in the hot social-networking site at a ridiculous $10 billion valuation–called my analysis of the company and its possible shortcomings “glib.”

OK, so I looked up the word in the dictionary, and it turns out it means: “readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely.”

Thanks, Dave! Given my long history as someone who has been pretty bullish on the Web, it’s unusual for me to be the irksome tsk-tsk voice of reason about the bubble being blown up here, so I am glad to be thought of as superficial!

Writes Kirkpatrick:

How can you put a price tag on the future? That’s what any investor in Facebook would be doing.

“There’s no way the company is worth that kind of money today, despite the 43 million active users it claims. (The Journal reports that private Facebook this year expects to make $30 million profit on $150 million in revenues.) But that is not the same thing as saying that somebody would be insane to buy a small chunk at such a valuation. (For a glib and contrasting view from Kara Swisher, see AllThingsD.)”

After that, he goes on to call the service the Internet equivalent of the second coming of Google, except with its people-centric, six-degrees-of-separation vision called a “social graph” by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

(Calling AOL! Some kid hijacked your old vision and is about to make bank with it!)

More importantly with all this relevant interconnectedness, posits Kirkpatrick, Facebook is apparently the promised land of advertising of the future, which is all about giving the consumers ads they actually want!

Ads as a service! Ads as a benefit! Ads not as an intrusion!

I don’t mean to be glib, but this kind of ad cheerleading has been trotted out by AOL, by Yahoo, by every dot-com start-up I ever met and its promise has always been more, shall we say, bloated than its delivery.

And even now, with all the advances in online behavior-targeting–which I like to call “consumer-stalking”–it’s mostly still just a lot of marketing blabbery that is good for flimflamming the media buyers at Procter & Gamble and little else.

Other new buzzy phrases in this genre include: claiming consumers want to be “brand ambassadors” for a wide range of products (I suspect that list is quite short); declaring all advertising as needing to be “viral,” which should be enough to make buyers ill; and even claiming that ads are content (so far, only Apple’s Mac/PC commercials seem to rate in this department).

While Facebook is certainly a very good place to test all these theories, perhaps even the best place at the moment, a smarter investor might want to use such money to play all over the Web, testing out all sorts of new ad formats.

And spending hundreds of millions to get a small stake in this game in just one company–which is still No. 2 in the market, lest we forget about rival MySpace–seems like a recipe for disappointment.

That is especially true if what GigaOm’s Om Malik writes about government pressures to make the service safer for young people comes to pass–which could land Facebook into a miasma of controversy.

To Kirkpatrick’s credit, he is quite right when he writes about the drive of Zuckerberg, pictured below, who appears to be very confident, thoughtful and hard-charging, although I am not so sure his comparison of Zuckerberg to Microsoft’s Bill Gates is a good one to make.

Zuckerberg shouldn’t be a wannabe of him, given that company’s history of bullying domination, any more than he should try to pattern himself after the arrogant brainiac style of Google.

If I were him, if he has to be like anyone, I would act more like Steve Jobs, whose iconoclastic style has left a lot of possible market power on the table in the past, but whose single-minded devotion to product excellence has made Apple a brand for the ages.

Steve Jobs even took money from Microsoft, but it was only when he had no other choice. Zuckerberg does have a choice, a lot of them, which is often harder than having none.

So, by all means, dream big. By all means, run as fast as you can to grow what we can all agree is a great platform. By all means, take the money if it means it will help you get there.

But I don’t mean to be insincere when I say too: For all your promise, think hard about what you can actually deliver.

This week Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interview Satish Dharmaraj of Zimbra, on the online GigaOM Show on Revision3.

It’s a nice get in the wake of the $350 million sale of the email start-up to Yahoo, a story we broke last week in this column here.

They also chat with VC Jeff Clavier, who has a new seed-stage fund.

Here also is the video interview I did with Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo, who led the acquisition of Zimbra, the morning the deal was announced:

This week Om Malik and his co-host Joyce Kim interview Max Levchin, Slide CEO, on the online GigaOM Show on Revision3.

I did a three-part series of interviews with Max, as well as doing a video of a visit I paid to the widgetmaker’s offices in San Francisco, and I posted them all yesterday.

But here is the GigaOm Show’s take on Max. Also, Om says a bad word!

The ever helpful Jim Louderback–now of Revision3, who works with Om Malik at his GigaOM show on that video site–comes through with an embeddable show.

And I only had to ask nice once after I complained in a post here that the online video show was not viral. Horrors!

Malik hosts the interview show weekly with lawyer Joyce Kim. Now you can see me talking with them about my thoughts about Dow Jones under new owner Rupert Murdoch, as well as on topics like blogging, traditional journalism and the doings at Facebook and Yahoo.

The video also includes a session before mine with Ryan Block of Engadget. Plus you get to see a rare, limited-edition Walt Mossberg “Craplets!” T-shirt.

Thanks Jim! (And also for paper-airplane-sitting Louie, while I blabbered away.)

Here’s the video:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

That old charmer Om Malik lured me onto his online GigaOM Show on Revision3, where he and co-host Joyce Kim interviewed me for its seventh episode about a range of topics.

They included getting me to talk about what I really think of new owner Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch (quick summary: He’s certainly been a controversial media mogul, but we’ll see!), as well as my thoughts about blogging, traditional journalism and my two favorite Web companies to report on right now, Facebook and Yahoo.

Bonus: First up in the program is the always clever Ryan Block of Engadget, who I think is one of the sassier tech reporters out there.

I seem unable to embed the whole program–Om, get on it!–but you can see it here, and also hear it, too. But here are some pictures below, including me showing off my limited-edition Walt Mossberg “Craplets!” T-shirt.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.