Back in November I wrote about how Guardian Media Group was attempting to sell off paidContent. paidContent is a tech blog that is run by a company called contentNext. Guardian Media Group acquired contentNext in July 2008 for approximately $30 million including earn-outs. It was rumored that contentNext did not meet the earn-out requirements for the full price and Guardian did not know how to efficiently manage the brand. Today GigaOM has announced that they have acquired paidContent and the other contentNext properties for an undisclosed sum.

Technology blog and research company GigaOM has raised $6 million in a round led by London-based venture capital company Reed Elsevier Ventures. Reed is one of the largest publishing companies. Other investors participating in this round include Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. Kevin Brown of REV will be joining the board of directors. GigaOM is raising a new round of funding so they can grow GigaOM Pro. GigaOM Pro is a research service that has over 400 in-depth reports that covers 5 industries in real-time. [GigaOM]

Technology blog network GigaOM has raised $2.5 million from True Ventures and Alloy Ventures. GigaOM founder Om Malik said that the new funding will not be used for acquisition but for “the future.”

Federated Media is an advertising broker partner for many top tech tier sites.  They power the advertising for TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable, You’re the man now dog, AppleInsider, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, TechDirt, etc.  To date, Federated Media has raised $57.5 million.

Federated Media (FM) has lost a number of partners to acquisitions and poaching.  Digg was a partner of FM before Microsoft signed a deal with them.  Ars Technica was a partner of FM before Condé Nast bought them out.  Another Federated ad partner, Sphere was picked up by AOL.

Now GigaOm will be stepping down from FM to sign with IDG Group.  IDG’s Network includes CIO, Computerworld, JavaWorld, Linuxworld, Macworld, PC World, etc.

In related news, Federated Media is also slashing advertising rates in order to adapt to rough economic advertising conditions.  TechCrunch’s CPM has been dropped from $36 to $23.40.  Silicon Alley Insider’s weekly square button ads have been dropped from $630 to $409.50.

A big congratulations is in order for Om Malik and his team of bloggers.  It’s been about 27 months since Malik went full-time on Giga Omni Media and the company has already acquired several other blogs, raised a previous round of funding, and is being syndicated by media companies such as CNN and The New York Times.

The lead investor in the $4.5 million round of funding is Alloy Ventures.  True Ventures also participated in this round of funding.  Angel investors in Giga Omni Media include Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan, and Anand Rajaraman.  Ammar Hanafi of Alloy Ventures will be joining the Giga Omni Media board as part of the funding deal.  Ammar is the former head of corporate business development at Cisco. 

Within the last year, GigaOm acquired jkOntheRun and TheAppleBlog. 

Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media and editor of GigaOM is not only an entrepreneur and a blogger, but now he is a venture partner. Earlier this summer, Jon Callaghan, Phil Black, and John Burke invited Om Malik to join True Ventures as a venture partner.

“The move will not take any time away from my work at GigaOM. What it will do, however, is give me a chance to closely observe the venture business, which could lead me to one day being a venture capitalist myself. And it is yet another way for me to indulge in my love of startups,” stated Malik. “Though I am extremely picky as to which startup I write about, I love meeting them all. Why? Because ideas fascinate me. People amaze me. So this is just an extension of the same enthusiasm, but from
a different dimension.”

Other board members of True Ventures includes Tony Conrad, CEO of Sphere and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic. True Ventures is also an investor in GigaOm.

Image Credit: Valleywag

[image credit:laffy4k]

Today BusinessWeek and GigaOM formed a syndication partnership.  BW will be featuring content from Om Malik’s blog network every Monday.  After hearing about this, I realized that traditional media companies need blogs like us to keep them looking cool & hip.

This hypothesis is apparent when Guardian Media, a British media company acquired paidContent for over $30 million last week.  Another example is that the Washington Post inked deals with paidContent and TechCrunch to syndicate their content.  Video blogger, Loren Feldman produces videos for CNET (now owned by CBS) on a regular basis.  And then The New York Times bought out the Freakonomics blog in August 2007.

Are traditional media companies having a hard time finding talented journalists and bloggers themselves to provide the same unique content as us?  Blogging isn’t rocket science.  I’m just blogging to make money to power my own startup ideas, pay the office rent, and learn more about the industry.  What are your thoughts?  Why does traditional media need us?

Turf wars don’t just happen in the streets.  They also happen in Valleys.  For example, Kevin Rose’s Digg users saw Rose as a victim to theft from Jason Calacanis’ influence on the redesign of Netscape.  However, Kevin and Jason clearly presented mutual respect for each other on the last episode of The GigaOM Show.

If I were to take anything away useful from the entire episode, I would say this would this dialogue would be it:
Om: “Are you two Facebook friends or no?”
Rose: “Yeah, we are.”
Joyce: “Top friends?”
Rose: “Uh, I haven’t added that stupid Top Friends application, I refuse to do it.”

In this episode, I was happy to see that I wasn’t the only tech-savvy person annoyed by some of the useless applications appearing on Facebook.  Another part of the episode I liked is when Om asked Calacanis why nobody likes him.  I didn’t envision Om to be so blunt.  I think I’m actually starting to like The GigaOM show better than Diggnation already.