If you come to GigaOM on a regular basis, you may notice that we’re doing a little tidying up around here, or specifically, up there. As of today, we’re simplifying our top navigation, removing the Collaboration and Broadband channels. All the archived content from those channels will remain on the site (so your old URLs will still work) and is accessible through our search box and, of course, your search engine of choice. However, we won’t be posting any new content to those channels.
Bringing more focus to the site
These changes reflect our basic editorial mission. When Om started GigaOM, he chose to focus on the most important stories — not necessarily the ones that will garner the highest pageviews, but the ones that have the greatest potential to change technology and how we interact with it. We don’t cover every story in tech news, and we probably never will.
That philosophy has always driven what we cover. Yet, as the site grew to 10 channels, our site’s navigation no longer reflected that focus. We heard from some of our readers that it was a little confusing. We had to agree. We had to simplify.
Our broadband coverage underpins everything else we do on the site because broadband underpins every major development in connected technology. The increasing access to faster, more reliable broadband makes so much of the tech we talk about today — the cloud, big data, mobile apps, etc. — possible.
To understand the future of connected technology, you need to understand broadband. Read the stories Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Fitchard write, and you will begin to see where technology is heading. We decided that there’s no longer any reason to sequester that content off into its own channel. From now on, our broadband stories will appear on our main GigaOM channel and mobile broadband stories will appear on our Mobile channel.
Similarly, Collaboration no longer made sense as a standalone channel on our site. When we launched this channel as WebWorkerDaily in 2006, increasing broadband speeds and greater access to broadband were rapidly transforming the ways we worked. New terms were being coined as we tried to understand this phenomenon and its participants: “virtual workforce,” “web workers,” “freelance economy.” It was enormously disruptive — both to how work got done and to workers’ lifestyles. WebWorkerDaily was launched to address all of that.
Fast forward six years, and these terms have all but disappeared. This once-disruptive way of working has become a matter of course for many companies in tech and beyond. It’s no longer “web work,” it’s just “work.” Work from home policies are viewed more as a standard offering than a benefit. Nearly every cafe you walk into — well, at least the ones with free Wi-Fi — are filled with people tapping away at their open laptops and taking conference calls on their mobile phones. Most of our readers have at least one coworker who works in a different country or at least a different time zone.
Although we will continue to cover this trend from an enterprise perspective on GigaOM Pro, we will no longer have a dedicated channel on the site. As with Broadband, we will continue to write about these issues — whether it’s a new startup, emerging technology, or trend — on GigaOM, Mobile, or another appropriate channel. Looking back at the past six years of WebWorkerDaily/Collaboration, so many people were instrumental in making this site a reality. There are too many to list here, but I’d especially like to thank editors Simon Mackie, Ann Zelenka, and Judi Sohn and two of our top writers over the past year, Jessica Stillman and Terri Griffith.
And there’s more to come
Think of these small changes as another iteration of GigaOM, following on our expansion into the media industry, New York and Europe earlier this year. But there’s more news to come. We’ll always keep our same editorial focus. Our stellar editorial team — which, in my opinion, is made up of the smartest writers in tech reporting — will continue bringing you intelligent takes on the most important stories in technology, telling you not only what happened today but how it will affect the tech landscape going forward. But stay tuned over the next few months for some exciting announcements about new technologies our team is focusing on and new enhancements to our site.
This post was updated at 4:56 p.m. to thank our fabulous WebWorkerDaily editors from the past six years.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user CarbonNYC
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