Before you all go away for the holiday weekend to set off loud explosive devices, a little Gigaom site news. We're introducing two new channels today: Science & Energy, and Social & Web.
As part of our continuing quest to discover the Next Big Thing in the tech industry, we decided that we wanted to highlight our coverage of these areas in a broader way. It's been a while since we last updated that little bar at the top of our homepage with new destinations, and the only constant in the tech world is that things change.
The Science & Energy channel replaces the Cleantech channel, but it's more of an expansion of what was covered there than a retreat from the topic. You'll find stories about alternative energy sources, materials science, 3D printing, space, resource management, robotics, and a lot more in this channel as we continue to increase our coverage of this very interesting area.
Social & Web is pretty self-explanatory: we write an awful lot about Google, Facebook, Twitter and web startups but we've never given those stories their own home on our site. This channel rectifies that, and you'll also find stories about web privacy and regulation here.
As part of this housecleaning, we're removing Apple and Europe as standalone channels, but I want to be clear: we're not removing Apple and Europe from our coverage agenda.
At some point a few years ago, say 2007 through 2012 or so, it made sense to treat Apple as a standalone beat and channel. The company simply changed everything about the world of consumer computing during those years, and writing about those developments was as important as anything we did. However, in 2014, the post-PC era is firmly entrenched, and it makes less sense for us to devote that precious real estate to a single company. We'll still be writing an awful lot about Apple, but you'll find the majority of those stories in our Mobile channel.
Along the same lines, at one point we thought Europe would evolve into its own coverage area, but we've learned that a lot of the same topics we write about across Gigaom apply just as much to European companies and users as they do outside that continent. There are certainly exceptions (the post-Snowden European skepticism about U.S.-based cloud services is something we've written a lot about), but we've got limited space at the top of our page and wanted to find a home for our Social & Web coverage.
Thanks for continuing to read Gigaom. We've got a few more changes lined up over the course of the rest of the year, so stay tuned.