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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

There are so many tech publications, and I never knew why I should read Gigaom instead of others. Perhaps that's one reason they didn't attract enough revenue. Can anyone answer that question?

Even better: Can anyone advise what publications they would read if they were interested in innovations in technologies and in their applications, rather than in products? That is, I'm interested in innovations or developments like IoT or blockchain or HTTP/2, and innovative ways to utilize them. Generally I'm not interested in something like the latest MacBook Air; it's significant in the marketplace, but for my purposes it only marginally improves and repackages existing tech.

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I actually just rely on an RSS reader to present a whole bunch of ad-free headlines to me, and then I decide what looks interesting. The hottest topics are often covered by multiple, similar outlets, and then there are also niche publishers (like gwern, for example).

Almost unbelievably, on mobile my favorite feed reader is Pulse, which LinkedIn bought a year or so back. I've used Feedly, too, and Google's Newsstand, but Pulse seems easier to scan through.

For tech-specific news, HN is the best source to meta-news that's actually technical, as well as human curated weirdness. /r/programming, /r/technology, /r/android, etc are all good, too. Whenever there's a big trade show or launch event, I usually check Pando, TheVerge, UberGizmo and a few others (Re/Code, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc). I have an IFTTT recipe that pushes any new Android app disassembly article from Phandroid and Android Police (they do a FANTASTIC job of analyzing Google app updates for unspecified changes, and also always rehost the APKs). I look for in-depth product reviews from Anandtech. I laugh at XKCD's always timely cartoons.

Note that for the ones I follow via a reader, I almost never go to their site directly, and never see any ads. I do use an adblocker (uBlock), but I am considering uninstalling it because of memory consumption. I'm on a Chromebook most of the time and between Gmail & adblockers, 4GB of RAM just isn't sufficient.

It was my site of choice because they weren't so shameless about pushing tons of clickbait on the readers. Alas, it must have contributed to its demise.

I didn't know about this site. Sounds good but I suspect I'm a tad late to the party.

I've always found if it was really important, it would show up in my twitter feed or HN - So rather than going to the various sites, I just use those two as my meta-index.

I read a bunch of different tech sites, but it my opinion, the most relevant stuff is on HN. It basically aggregates all the best stuff from all the tech publications anyway, so you are probably just as well off in the end. Of course, if you want to read more academic articles per se, stick to the big science publications like Nature, etc.

Here's a list in no particular order:

1) recode

2) pando daily

3) techcrunch

4) techmeme (another good aggregator)

5) Mit tech review

6) New York Times Bits

7) WSJ D

8) CNET

9) Mashable

O'Reilly Radar

Mashable?! I know it's last in the list, but come on. I can't take your list seriously now. Mashable... Ha.

Ars Technica?

Ars Technica is basically an aggregator that dumbs things down almost to Associated Press level. Ars will give you a clue about what's newsworthy, but if you want technical details you have to track down their sources (which were probably on HN and Reddit the previous week).

http://arstechnica.com/science is a little bit better than the rest of the site, but its median article quality is also going downhill.

Yep, I saw a sharp decline in quality and increase in clickbait right around when GamerGate picked up steam. Maybe it was happening before but it's very noticeable now. Too bad.

I have stopped frequenting Ars over the last year or so, which is a shame. Their articles back in the day about CPU architectures (P4, Core, AMD64 etc.) were basically the reason I went into Electrical Engineering.

I really loved Ars back when it was good :(

Ars Technica had the best reporting of the Silk Road trial by a long shot

No way, man. Their reviews are solid.

For me, Ars is still better than every other site listed. Their quality might have slid, but they are still the best[1]. I grew tired of other sites' clickbait and/or blatant partisanship/slant.

1. for me.

I stopped reading Pando after I realized that their main media angle is to pick at least one major fight a week.

http://www.fastcompany.com/section/technovore

I have visited his writings in the above link more than the actual Gigaom site. One thing i will say, is that there are some really talented journalists at Gigaom.

That is excellent, thanks.

(If you happen to know an address for an RSS feed of Technovore, I'd be very appreciative. Fast Company seems to offer only their entire site's headlines (http://feeds.feedburner.com/fastcompany/headlines), which has too poor signal-to-noise to add to my feeds.)

EDIT: Nevermind, found it: http://www.fastcompany.com/user/om-malik.rss

In the big data space, you had to read Gigaom. They cared a lot about projects like Hadoop, and it showed. Derrick Harris has been doing great work for years. RIP for a solid tech publication.

Agreed. GigaOM was also a terrific source for news about Cloud Computing. Derrick and Barb Darrow had a great podcast as well that covered both topics, The Structure Show. An extremely entertaining and well produced podcast that had some terrific interviews.

Such a shame. Was always a big fan of Om from back when he'd appear on the Cranky Geeks show and loved what he built at GigaOM.

I pay for the Launch Ticker (https://www.launchticker.com/). No linkbait or hyperbole, just key facts about the latest tech stories.

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