Two tech blogs with a lot of influence

Michelle Kessler of USA Today writes Tuesday about the TechCrunch, started by Michael Arrington, and GigaOm, started by Om Malik, blogs that write about the high-tech industry situated in and around the Silicon Valley.

Kessler wrote, “GigaOm has readers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and TechCrunch’s audience tops a million. But that doesn’t accurately reflect their far-reaching influence. TechCrunch is the fourth-most-linked-to blog on the Internet, says Technorati, a blog search engine. GigaOm ranks 34th, a still impressive number given that Technorati tracks more than 86 million blogs.”

“TechCrunch’s impact could soon be as great as Silicon Valley’s major newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, says Paul Gillin, author of blog guide The New Influencers. ‘It’s one of the first things I read every day,’ says David Cowan, a venture capitalist for Bessemer Venture Partners. ‘It’s hard to describe the extent to which I rely on TechCrunch.’

“GigaOm may not have quite as much pull, but it still has a long list of powerful readers. Malik is ‘a really smart guy, and he makes me think,’ says Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist with several Silicon Valley firms. ‘He’s really significant,’ says Max Kalehoff, a vice president at research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics.”

Read more here.