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So here we are — the last day of 2011 and the end of the first year of me writing my occasional newsletter, Om Says. Being on a break, I decided to not read the web and instead go analog and read a lot of books to nourish my mind. For me, it was an enjoyable year of writing these newsletters and I have picked out 12 stories from the archives that I feel are something you might want to revisit during the New Year’s weekend. Happy 2012, everyone.

The top story of 2011 that impacted me personally:

Steve Jobs and the sound of silence

Steve Jobs left a big hole not only for his company, but also for the tech industry. In a time when so many companies focus on short-term decisions, Jobs taught us that real success is in taking the long view…

I’d already ordered Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs before it became clear he was dying. That didn’t change the experience of the read – though the book arrived after his death.

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I almost forgot to post this, this year. Best Jingle Bells ever.

And as ever – thanks to Om Malik for pointing it out to the rest of the West.

Like many of my colleagues in Silicon Valley, I was having a fantastic day today. It is crisp in the shade, warm in the sun. The skies are a magical blue with puffy clouds floating like dreams. And when all seemed to be going well, an email in my inbox — without as much as the new message sound — arrived: Letter from Steve Jobs. It was as if the inbox was observing the solemnnity of the occasion. It is an end of an era.

The first thought that ran through my head was about Steve’s health, and I thought to myself that this cannot be good. I don’t care about him being the CEO or head of Apple. What I really do care about is his health. He wouldn’t be making this decision unless things were pretty dire.

It is incredibly hard for me to write right now. To me, like many of you, it is an incredibly emotional moment. I cannot look at Twitter, and through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer. I cannot hear the sounds of the street or the ring of my phone. The second hand on my watch moves slowly, ever so slowly. I want to wake up and find it was all a nightmare.

And while I wish for him to have more time with his family, I am also being very selfish. I will miss the thespian who made inanimate objects like a computer become a thing to behold. A few years ago, I compared Steve to Howard Hughes using the line, “Some men dream the future. He built it…”

Jobs (and by extension, Apple) has taught me (and I am sure others) a big lesson: If you want to change something, you have to be patient and take the long view. If Apple and Steve’s incredible comeback teaches us something, it’s that when you are right and the world doesn’t see it that way, you just have to be patient and wait for the world to change its mind.

Today, we are living in a world that’s about taking short-term decisions: CEOs who pray to at the altar of the devil called quarterly earnings, companies that react to rivals, politicians who are only worried about the coming election cycle and leaders who are in for the near-term gain.

And then there are Steve and Apple: a leader and a company not afraid to take the long view, patiently building the way to the future envisioned for the company. Not afraid to invent the future and to be wrong. And almost always willing to do one small thing — cannibalize itself. Under Steve, Apple was happy to see the iPhone kill the iPod and iPad kill the MacBook. He understands that you don’t walk into the future by looking back. If you do, you trip over yourself and break your nose.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you, Om, for bringing insight and understanding to sadness. Thanks for opening the door to the future – that seemed like it was ready to be shuttered by the naysayers who never believed in anything enough to fight for it with their whole being.

Click the link in the post and read the whole letter. I’ve posted about half of it here.

Ignore the Livestream date. This was recorded a couple of days ago. Yes, I enjoyed watching the live stream in HiDef to my computer – as it happened. Om doesn’t take his offices apart very often for something like this – but, when he does, he gets the tech right.

This is an hour long. Enjoy as much as you like. Nice to experience a truly informal gathering like this one.

Yes, we originally posted this the wrong time of the year; but, I just noticed it’s catching lots of views.

I like how much fun this Jingle Bells is. And this time – it’s appropriate.

Dave Winer’s ability to peer into the future is uncanny. He was talking about a river of news long before the current activity streams became popular. He was evangelizing RSS long before there were blogs. I could go on and on about his prescient observations, but it’s his warnings that are especially prophetic.

For as long as I can remember, he’s been warning that users of new social web technologies need to be in control of their own destiny. He sounded the alarm about Feedburner and how it was hijacking an open standard, RSS, and inserting itself between content creators and consumers. And he’s long cited the need for open social communication platforms, often voicing his displeasure with newer services such as Twitter…

The cynical me believes that it’s foolish for any of us to expect that Web 2.0 companies be in the business of providing services for charity. They are, after all, for-profit entities and when opportunity arises, everyone looks out for themselves. That’s just the way of the world. But somewhere between my cynicism and people’s Utopian desires lies a happy place. It’s called the blog.

Late last year, following the Bombay terrorist attacks, I wrote about Twitter’s growing influence as a source of breaking news and how, in order to make sense of it all, we need more context. The best place to provide that context is now in blogs. To be sure, most people view Twitter as a microblogging service, but I’ve always seen it as micromessaging service — and the more I used it, the more I realized what a disjointed conversation it can produce…

Earlier this week, while at dinner with Matt Mullenweg (Disclosure: Matt, a close friend of mine, started Automattic, whose WordPress platform powers our network. Both Automattic and the GigaOM Network are backed by True Ventures, where I am also a venture partner.), we talked about how many amazing blog posts we’ve read in just the past month alone…

Now it would be easy for “blogging” to be satisfied with this information-sharing role. But that won’t be enough. Blogs need to evolve even further.

Why? Because the nature of content sharing (call it publishing) and content consumption is changing.

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The GigaOM Network has been increasing its group of tech blogs, but its newest feature is a subscription research service called GigaOM Pro.

Om Malik, the founder of GigaOM Network, plans to sell in-depth research reports on technology sectors and shorter, timely reports on companies and news in those sectors to technology and business executive. Subscriptions to the service, which GigaOM is unveiling Thursday, will cost $79 a year at first and more down the road, said Mr. Malik, in an interview. (Read Mr. Malik’s blog post on GigaOM Pro here.)

GigaOM is the latest example of a Web company that once relied solely on advertising for revenue adding new revenue streams. On Monday, I wrote about other start-ups making similar shifts.

“To assume that there is only one revenue stream, which is advertising, is kind of short-sighted in this kind of media economy,” Mr. Malik said. He does not believe in charging for content that publishers have already given readers for free, so GigaOM Pro adds additional services. Readers have asked for deeper analysis than blog posts can provide, he added…

Six GigaOM Pro analysts will cover four areas: infrastructure, mobile, green I.T. and the connected consumer. Led by Michael Wolf, who recently joined GigaOM from the analysis firm ABI, they will add more topics in coming weeks. Bloggers for GigaOM blogs will contribute content.

GigaOM Pro will also offer longer briefings, like a 23-page report on the smart energy home or a 65-page briefing on social media in the enterprise. There are quarterly and weekly wrap-ups and closer looks at certain companies in a sector, such as a report on whether Google will lead the way in mobile app innovation and an analysis of Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital. Analysts also publish collections of links to relevant articles from around the Web.

I suppose this wouldn’t be especially newsworthy or a topic for a diarist like me – except for the fact that it centers on Om Malik. Om is not a guru; but, his knowledge of tech business – grounded in a global understanding of many business streams – provides a heck of a lot more useful information than does anyone more likely to use the title.

I don’t give investment advice except to a couple of close kin. I think I ain’t bad at it because I got back to where I was before the recent crash – last week. But, if there is anyone in print, digital or otherwise, that I might credit with prompting a few of my picks – it would be Om.

I think Apple’s new device will look more like a Kindle than a netbook

Some Asian news outlets are reporting rumors that suggest Apple is working on a touchscreen device. This larger format iPod touch has been rumored for a while, and it’s said to be a “netbook” type device. The question is: How likely is it that Apple will release a touchscreen, no-keyboard netbook? My best guess is that Apple is indeed working on a device similar to that being talked about in the blogs today.

Just as it redefined the MP3 player experience (with iPod) and reinvented the smartphone (with iPhone), Apple is going to pursue the netbook opportunity. But it won’t be with anything like the cheap, anorexic laptops being sold as netbooks today.

When Apple COO Time Cook was asked about netbooks during his conference call with analysts in February 2009, he said that the company was “watching the space,” but he dismissed the idea of offering a device that had “smaller screens, cramped keyboard.” In other words, if Apple does make a device that sits between an iPod touch/iPhone and a laptop, then it would mostly likely be a touchscreen device.

Some other clues that point toward the development of this device are found in the user interface on the recently released Safari 4.0 Beta. Charles Ying, who develops for WebKit, notes on his blog the similarities between Safari 4.0 and the iPhone Safari browser.

“I’m guessing that multi-touch user interactions are more positionally accurate due to direct user manipulation. That might explain some of the slight inconveniences Apple is making to pursue a unified multi-touch but full computing interface. I don’t know if Apple’s Netbook will run full Mac OS X, but I’m pretty sure that Safari 4’s user interface will at least be consistent.”

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