Om Malik, whose blog shaped how Silicon Valley was seen, has died aged 59

Om Malik, a technology journalist and investor whose blog Gigaom, which he founded in 2001, made him one of the most important voices in Silicon Valley and helped signal a shift in how the media covered the technology industry, died Wednesday in Palo Alto, California. He was 59 years old.

An announcement on his website, Om.cohe said his death in hospital came “after a long journey of heart health”.

Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also wiped out many startup journalism firms that wrote about technology, such as The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mix of searing insights and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.

“Android OS makes me feel like three hours after Chinese food: a little empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post which neatly sums up Google’s efforts to transcend its roots as a search platform. “Google needs to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”

In 2006, the site had 500,000 monthly readers and was ranked among the 50 most influential blogs by Technorati, a blog tracking platform. In 2015, when Gigaom ended, it claimed 6.4 million monthly readers.

The emergence of blogs like Gigaom and opinionated tech writers like Mr. Malik, Kara Swisher, and Jason Kottke have helped define the next iteration of tech journalism, moving it from established publications to unique voices.

Mr. Malik, who made his way in the 1990s as a culture and technology journalist for sites like Forbes.com and Red Herring, was both a believer in the power of technology as a social force and a skeptic of its tendency to evangelize about itself.

In 2003, he wrote the book “Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist,” a scathing indictment of the broadband industry that grew rapidly in the late 1990s.

Long before Facebook attacked both the political left and the right, he said during a 2013 Bloomberg TV interview that what he said was “absolutely immoral” on the part of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In the same interview, he criticized venture capitalist John Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”

Mr. Malik started his blog somewhat by accident. While still writing for Red Herring, a tech-focused trade publication, he found himself writing articles on niche topics of the time, such as mobile internet and social media, that the magazine didn’t want. Still, he wrote about them in emails to friends and then archived them on a Blogger page.

“Maybe I’ve found my art form, haven’t I?” he said inside 2016 interview for the Techies website. “It wasn’t traditional journalism, it wasn’t news writing. It was a bit of an opinion piece. I think my whole background was growing into being a blogger.”

He had a rare ability to see around corners and pick out the hordes of new companies that would make a real difference. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging service, and in 2006 was the first blogger to write extensively about Twitter. He wasn’t a fan.

“Annoying text messages from late-night friends aren’t the only thing that bothers me about this service,” he wrote“but also that sending a message (reply) to twttr ends up on their site.”

The flexibility of blogging — and its release from traditional standards of journalistic ethics — allowed Mr. Malik to play roles beyond mere writer. In 2006, he founded Giga Omni Media, a media and research company that became home to Gigaom and other blogs. He sold it in 2015. (The original Gigaom blog was discontinued, but Mr. Malik migrated some of its original content to Om.co, where he continued to write until earlier this month.)

In 2008, he joined True Ventures, a startup funding company, and became a full-time partner in 2014.

By the end of 2010, he had established himself as a unique figure in the tech industry: investor, advisor, writer, and above all, a moral compass on issues like privacy and the power of big tech.

“I’m kind of joking about this, but I think Silicon Valley has become the Babylon of the 21st century,” Techies said. “I think we have a moral responsibility now, I don’t think the techs have to think about it.

Om Prakesh Malik was born on 29 September 1966 in New Delhi to what he later described as a solid middle-class Indian family. His father was an army officer and his mother taught Sanskrit in a high school.

Mr. Malík later said that he knew at the age of 14 that he wanted to be a journalist. But he studied chemistry at St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, from which he graduated in 1986.

Early in his career, he worked for various Indian magazines, including VP Fun, which he described as the national version of Tiger Beat, a spirited teenage publication.

In 1992 he moved to London and the following year to New York, without a job and with only a few freelance assignments. He has written for a number of publications focused on the American Indian community and founded the entertainment website Desiparty.com.

He eventually began writing about telecommunications for Forbes and in 1997 became one of the founding members of the Forbes.com team, the magazine’s first technology news venture. He left journalism in 1999 to work for an investment bank, but returned after just eight months, finding he missed writing.

He wrote for Red Herring and Business 2.0 before starting his blog just weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. Malík never married or had children. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

He suffered a heart attack in December 2007, an episode he revealed a week later on his blog with his trademark candor and humor.

“Friends and family cleaned my apartment of smoke, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods,” he wrote. “I’ll even drink decaf.”