USA Today has a nice profile on GigOm and TechCrunch:
“Om (Malik) and I love scotch,” Michael Arrington says. “But we never drink anymore.”
The two friends no longer have the time or energy, in part because they’re too busy competing with each other.
Both run influential technology blogs that are helping drive the current Internet boom — and making Arrington and Malik tech luminaries in their own right.
Arrington, 37, is the force behind TechCrunch, a blog chronicling the rise and fall of Internet start-ups. (They’re often called Web 2.0 companies.) Malik, 40, runs GigaOm, a slightly more scholarly blog that looks at all things techy.
GigaOm has readers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and TechCrunch’s audience tops a million. But that doesn’t accurately reflect their far-reaching influence. TechCrunch is the fourth-most-linked-to blog on the Internet, says Technorati, a blog search engine. GigaOm ranks 34th, a still impressive number given that Technorati tracks more than 86 million blogs.
TechCrunch’s impact could soon be as great as Silicon Valley’s major newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, says Paul Gillin, author of blog guide The New Influencers. “It’s one of the first things I read every day,” says David Cowan, a venture capitalist for Bessemer Venture Partners. “It’s hard to describe the extent to which I rely on TechCrunch.”
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