It has been a few years since I spruced up the look and feel of Om.co — it has been very sparse and minimal, mostly because I didn’t feel excited enough to write with a regular cadence. I wanted to put a distance between me and GigaOm. I wanted a clean cut with the idea of constant deadlines. Frankly, I just felt burned out and wrote when (and if) I was highly compelled. 

2016 has been a year of rejuvenation and I have a newfound energy to write, travel and share one more time. While I am no longer interested in blogging professionally, I want to write as often as I can about things that mean a lot of me — technology, venture capital, startups, photography, fashion & style and sometimes popular culture & sports. And since I look at the world through the lens of technology you will see my postings reflect that point of view.

A few months back, I wrote about Unsplash, an open source photo sharing site created by Vancouver-based creative platform Crew.co. One thing led to another, and folks from Crew.co suggested that I try their platform to find a designer to redesign the blog. Why not, I thought? It was going to reduce the need for me to go searching for a designer and with the right brief, I just might find the right person to build the right template and theme. After a little bit of work, I sifted through about a dozen resumes and ended up with Brian Delaney, who has turned out to be a joy to work with.

We hit it off immensely from day one and his efforts to understand how I think about the brand, the blog and, most importantly, my readers and community were refreshing. Design, to him, it seemed, wasn’t just pixels but more about making sure that the readers got what they needed with minimal effort and maximum return.

“I really like your logo, but especially the first two glyphs,” he wrote to me. “Your name is very distinct within the industry and since the letters of your first name are also your initials, I think shortening the logo to just OM (with the double M glyph) is very succinct and a great brand symbol.”
This kind of crisp thinking portended to better and bigger things. And five weeks after he first sent me a mock-up, we are live. It was a painless experience and I can’t recommend Brian and Crew.co highly enough. Every penny I spent on the redesign was worth it.

Since 2011, I have been talking about the need for curation. It is one of the reasons why I started my “7 Stories to read this weekend” newsletter. In today’s world we are overrun with an excessive amount of content about technology and the culture of technology, and I sense a need to curate relevant and imports works — including articles, opinions, apps, projects and even podcasts and videos. I think the increasingly clickbait nature of coverage and overemphasis on the large companies such as Uber, Facebook and Google is taking attention away from seismic technological shifts. I will curate a lot of these developments. In many ways it is back to the future. Early days of GigaOm were about curating the best of technology writing and news at a time when media was abandoning technology. Now we have a problem of plenty.

So instead of “7 Stories to read this weekend,” you will get an email every so often with relevant stuff, whether it is written by me or others, and it will simply be known as the “Om Says” newsletter. I hope you don’t mind the name change and enjoy the variety of the information. Don’t worry, I am not looking to overwhelm your inbox, and I will be very discreet in sending these emails.

In addition to finding my work here, you can follow me on my Facebook Page, on Instagram, on Twitter and on Snapchat. I look forward to continuing our conversation.