The whole Daniel Brusilovsky/ TechCrunch Crunchgate free laptops for coverage saga continues to drag on like a poorly written soap opera with a post from the founder of startup Divvyshot.

Sam Odio confesses in a blog post that he was the startup founder at the center of the storm, and that Daniel asked him repeatedly for a Macbook Air. You can read the whole thing here.

I’ll give Odio credit for confessing and admitting to have done wrong (and it’s credit due,) but likewise he makes a number of claims that are bizarre to say the least.

Odio claims that he didn’t say no to Brusilovsky, and indeed strung the kid along for a week until finally deciding high school fashion to dob him in to Michael Arrington for the request. Although the time line isn’t 100% clear, that would appear to be strung out for the week after he had the post published to TechCrunch. Odio claims now that this was wrong, and hindsight is after all 20/20. But likewise the whole “I wished Daniel would stop asking” claim is a bit bizarre: indeed, he kept telling Daniel “we can do this, but not right now.” Sounds an awful lot to a casual observer that he was mostly worried about keeping the coverage, until eventually Daniel’s pestering got too much…or perhaps in the mean time he grew a conscious.

But what truly lets the confession down is Odio’s bizarre decision to attack Jason Calacanis and Loren Feldman to complete the tale.

On one hand Odio claims that he wanted to be “as private about the matter as possible….[and for TechCrunch] keep my identity confidential.” And yet he wrote to Jason Calacanis disclosing his involvement.

Sorry, that’s bollocks.

I don’t begrudge Odio’s preference for privacy. But if you’re serious about your identity not being known, you don’t start telling third parties about your involvement. This is doubly so when it comes to Jason Calacanis, who is well known for publishing emails he’s received on his personal blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (and I mean it as no disrespect to Jason,) but seriously: you don’t get to remain anonymous and discuss it with third parties at the same time.

The attack on Loren Feldman borders on complete stupidity. The odds on someone finding out Odio’s involvement in Crunchgate was always on the table, and if it hadn’t been Loren it could have easily been someone else. This is the tech community after all: secrets leak. Shooting the messenger when you yourself disclosed your identity to a unrelated third party to the story: well, someone needs to buy a book on personal responsibility ASAP.

I don’t know Sam Odio, and I’m sure he’s normally a perfectly good bloke, but you don’t get to confess your sins and then blame others in the same breadth without being called out on it.

WordPress.com, the hosted blog service from Automattic has suffered a major outage today, bringing down millions of free blogs, and a number of well known blogs.

The outage started at around 1pm US PST (8am AEDT), and at the time of writing (2:50pm PST) all sites on WordPress.com remain offline.

“VIP” sites affected include the GigaOm network, TechCrunch, and the entire Cheezeburger network.

There are reports that the front page of WordPress.com at one stage displayed the message “There was a small systems error. Please try refreshing the page and if the error is still there drop us a note and let us know,” however we are unable to get the page to load at all.

As Allen Stern at CenterNetworks points out, the outage comes less than 2 weeks since TechCrunch moved from Rackspace to WordPress.com.

More when available.

Update: back up as at 3:40pm PST.

Guest Post Bio: Scott Campbell is a 14 year old freelance journalist and photographer. He’s written for BBC News Online, The Huffington Post and various British newspapers.

I’m Scott Campbell. I’m 14 and I previously worked for a news website named Net News Daily.

As the Daniel Brusilovsky incident came to light, I was quite frankly shocked. It’s an unfortunate truth that Daniel’s greediness may destroy opportunities in the media for other young people.

In 2009, Net News Daily conducted an investigation which uncovered a shocking truth; Brusilovsky had lied about the member numbers for his Teens in Tech website.

It was claimed that Teens in Tech had around 10,000 members, when in fact, it only had around 400 – 200 of which were spam accounts. You can read more about that on The Inquisitr here.

After we wrote that article, we were attacked by many of Brusilovsky’s supporters, and contacted by his lawyer, who made legal threats against us.

The people who hated us for that article are probably thinking twice now about ‘Wonder Child’ Daniel Bru.

He has committed a worse crime than we ever did, if we did. I’m sure his ‘lawyers’ won’t be much help in this situation where it is blatantly obvious he is at fault.

He had the cheek to call us unprofessional and immature (amongst other things) and he was extorting companies at the same time.

This is going to have a horrible effect on youth working in new media.

The people who hated us for that article are probably thinking twice now about ‘Wonder Child’ Daniel Bru.

Michael Arrington will obviously get a lot of backlash; He has basically launched Daniel Brusilovsky. Teens in Tech was practically created from TechCrunch.

Brusilovsky has made a huge and unnecessary mistake. He had it all, and he has thrown it all away due to his own greed.

I personally think it is a disgrace.

Let’s look at his non-apology apology on his blog:

“Thank you for the support thus far, and I hope you respect my decision to have some privacy.”

What support? He has EXTORTED companies into giving him things, who is going to ’support’ someone after that?

Some people are given too much, and obviously don’t appreciate it.

There will still be some who believe wholly in Daniel Bru. But he has turned the majority against him

He’s made his bed, now he can lie in it.

Editors note: this is a guest post from someone on the other side of the issue. We’ve quoted his work before (and it was good,) and he makes some valid points. This post is published because I believe it interesting, even if I may not agree with all its content. I hope in contributes to the debate

The sordid tale of cash for comment that has embroiled up and coming teen blogger Daniel Brusilovsky and TechCrunch has the tech blogosphere engrossed this week, but it’s time someone threw Daniel a bone.

If you’ve missed the story so far, check out TechCrunch sacks 17-year-old intern for trading toys for coverage and TechCrunch and its lost Teachable Moment for more; the short story is that Daniel has been sacked from TechCrunch for allegedly asking for a laptop in return to write a post about a startup.

It always staggered me that Daniel (I’m going to use his first name in this post because his last name is too hard to get right each time, besides pronouncing it) ended up writing for TechCrunch to begin with. He appears to be a smart kid, and without doubt a pretty solid self promoter. But the key here is that his fame, and rise to the halls of TechCrunch came about because of his ability to self promote, vs any actual real world experience in writing, be it as a blogger, journalist or combination there in.

But lets put that experience in context: he’s 16-17 (a kid,) and he came to online fame via a post on TechCrunch which swallowed Daniel’s spin that a basic WordPress MU install with a handful of users was an amazing teenage startup that would change the world.

People in glass houses

If we accept the laptop for content claim as real (and as Mark Hopkins points out, we haven’t heard Daniel’s side yet) Daniel is guilty of greed. That greed though isn’t something that is unique to Daniel, and anyone who suggests that it is unique has never worked in the tech blogosphere before (journalism isn’t any better I’d note.)

The reality is, and always has been that the content wheels of Silicon Valley have always been greased by freebie and favor. That could be something as simple as free drinks or a free meal, and can go as far as freebies from basic promotional material through to free to-keep products. Lets also not forget one of my favorites (I only managed one free trip to the US in my time): free travel. It can also mean access: Valley startups have always been picky on access, giving it to those who are more favorable to them.

There may be nothing wrong with most of that, but it begs the question: at which point is the editorial compromised by the facilitation of freebie or favor?

Daniel’s mistake was that as an inexperienced kid, he didn’t understand the subtleties of the system. A couple of years older and he’d know you don’t ask for something upfront, and asking for a Macbook Air is full blown greedy; but likewise he was thrown into that system and saw that everyone else was getting something, and he wanted his slice as well.

Victim

What Daniel did (if true) was wrong, but lets not confuse one point: he is not the aggressor here, he is the victim. He is a victim of a system that is no place for kids, let alone a place for those with a faint heart and any serious moral basis. I’ve slept so much better at night since I walked away from it, and I know others who feel exactly the same. There are those inside the system who have families to feed, and I don’t blame them either, but lets not lose site of the bigger picture.

If anything good comes of this, it should be a serious look at ethics within journalism and by extension blogging. What happens in blogging now is really just an extension of what has gone on in journalism for the last 100 years; that doesn’t excuse it, but to note that the problem is one ingrained in reporting of all sorts.

I don’t know Daniel, and I’ve never particularly liked what he had been doing, but I’m willing to throw the kid a bone on simple fairness, and that I actually feel sorry for him. Your career (as some have suggested) should never be over at 16, and we all make mistakes.

I hope those mentoring Daniel (and I know there have been some solid people previously helping him) give him the support he needs at this difficult time, and that having learned a lesson he may return a better person to the tech space.

It was a famous speech in Philadelphia during his run for office that President Obama got us to first think about Teachable Moments. The idea being that there are things that happen in our lives that are negative but the way in which we handle those moments helps to define us and our ability to do better.

I first found out about the blowup at TechCrunch this morning when I read our own Kim LaCapria’s post about Michael Arrington sacking young Daniel Brusilovsky because of accusations of accepting tech toys in exchange for favorable posts. I have followed that up with reading every post on the matter that came through my feed reader. Just for the record they are:

An Apology To Our Readers
Techcrunch Accepts Money for Posts – Fires Under Age Blogger Daniel Brusilovsky
Rule #1: be honest
The Line Was Crossed
Was Deleting All Daniel Brusilovsky’s Posts an FTC Blogger Guideline Violation? [#bruhaha]
Tech Journalism Wunderkind in Bribery Scandal
Payola allegations prompt TechCrunch to fire teen intern
Unpaid Techcrunch Reporter Sacked For Bribe Attempt

So I would say I have a really good grounding on all the angst and finger-pointing that is going on around what Daniel is suppose to have done.

There is only one problem with all this – we have yet to hear a true account of what were the circumstances surrounding this from Daniel himself. His blog post on the affair is couched in a way that would make a lawyer proud but no-where does he come out and say “Yes I did this – it was wrong.”

Instead we get:

In some way or another, a line was crossed that should have never been. At this time, I do not want to go into details, but I will publicly say that I am truly sorry to my family, friends, TechCrunch, and especially the tech community.

From TechCrunch all we get is veiled references to a “young intern” and the nuclear cleansing of their database of anything to do with this young intern aka Daniel Brusilovsky.

The sad part here is that TechCrunch, Daniel and us the readers have lost out on a perfect learning moment. Instead of Arrington standing up before his readers, with Daniel by his side – figuratively, and saying that yes Daniel has done something that was wrong and as a publication TechCrunch was lax in its oversight of a young blogger but we both can promise our readers that nothing like this will happen again we get the erasure of a young man’s past and quite possibly his future.

Yes what Daniel did, if he actually did it, was wrong but this shouldn’t be something that is used to destroy his future in the business. After all it isn’t like this isn’t something that happens in the blogosphere. As well this isn’t the first time that some-one has been caught doing this kind of thing.

In my opinion Michael Arrington, and TechCrunch, missed out on a great opportunity to show the whole tech blogosphere that we do indeed to thing differently. This isn’t a media world where a person’s error in judgement has them offered up as a sacrificial lamb on the alter of spin control and good PR.

Rather than chopping of the head of young Daniel and throwing him to the wolves of the blogosphere Arrington could have shown us all what it takes to be a good mentor – especially for someone with as much potential as young Daniel.

For Daniel the lesson was easy – you can’t hide any skeletons on the Internet. At some point what you do will come back to bite you on the ass. As well, and maybe a more important lesson given his age, is that short term gratification can have a higher price than long term planning and having realistic expectations of the future.

For us the readers the lesson was much the same as Daniel’s – there are no door’s on the Internet. At some point everything will come out in the open.

Now as bad as what Daniel did was it really cause for TechCrunch to nuke its database the way it did to rid every mention of young Daniel? Isn’t that really a bit of overkill given the situation?

It isn’t like TechCrunch could tainted forever by every word written by Daniel. At some point (most likely within a week or so given our Internet memory) this would have all blown over. Now though this nuclear reaction is has made me wonder if there is more to this whole story than we are being lead to understand.

Regardless though, the fact is that something wrong happened at TechCrunch and as good as it is that Arrington got out ahead of it the way he did I think he has also lost the perfect moment to learn something and show that TechCrunch is indeed a blog above blogs.

Sorry Michael but you blew it.

Michael Arrington is “shaken” and has dismissed 17-year-old tech wunderkind Daniel Brusilovsky after information emerged that the kid was demanding shiny new tech toys in exchange for TechCrunch coverage.

In a post publicly flogging the “unnamed” minor (easily discerned due to his notability and some identifying information) Arrington says all of Brusilovsky’s contributions have been deleted and that he hopes the intern will develop into a person who can “be more welcome in this community.” Ouch. After rescinding Daniel’s seat at the cool kids table, Arrington goes on to link to the boy’s blog, where Brusilovsky apologizes for the kickback-demands and says the word “amazing” about 35 times. To imagine how this boy must be feeling, take any of your high school gym class mortifications and multiply it by about a million. Then post it on the internet.

Of course, I’d imagine that no matter how clever a high school kid sounds or how impressively tech savvy he is, it might be a good idea to implement some oversight before turning out his work to the tech blogosphere unchecked. It’s likely he had a pretty good idea of at least the basic integrity related issues that surround receiving kickbacks for placements, but when I was seventeen I wasn’t allowed to work the fryolater alone at Roy Rogers, much less disseminate information to a large pool of readers that could make or break a fledgling company.

Generally, when kids screw things up on a large scale, they get in some trouble, but ultimately the adults in charge of them have to answer too for not keeping a close enough eye on the little bastards. Seventeen is still seventeen, and if the internet had been anything more than AOL over a carrier pigeon dial-up connection when I was that age, I imagine I would have gotten up to scads more idiocy. What really sucks is that what probably didn’t feel like too bad of a decision at the time will probably follow this kid for far longer than he could have imagined.

[Image]

Tech site TechCrunch as been subject to a hacking that has taken its main content completely offline.

As at 10:20pm PDT Monday (Jan 25) TechCrunch was offline with a message that simply stated “hi” on its main page (see image above.)

The hacking seems to have affected the main TechCrunch.com domain only, with subdomains still online.

Keith Dsouza on Twitter noted that the hack appeared to be server based, and not a DNS based hack.

The new hacking comes as some have recently reported security issues with Rackspace, the host of TechCrunch, Mashable, and range of other sites, including The Inquisitr.

Update: as at 10:37 PST (5:37pm AEDT) TechCrunch remains offline. A review of the HTML code for the page shows no hidden message: the only line in the code states “Hi.”

Update 2: as at 10:40pm PST (5:40pm AEDT) TechCrunch is back up.

Update 3: strangely after the site reappearing, there’s now a “we’ll be back shortly” message (time: 11:15pm PST to 11:25pm PST.)

Update 4: 11:33pm PST, TechCrunch back up again, although they’re still not saying anything about the hack.

Update 5: 11:43pm PST: the we’ll be back soon message is back.

Update 6: midnight PST TechCrunch is still down with the “we’ll be back soon message.” You can only presume they’ve kept it offline until they sort through the risk aspect.

Update 7: TechCrunch is still down as at 12:55am PST (07:56pm AEDT.) The message though has changed to “Earlier tonight techcrunch.com was compromised by a security exploit. We’re working to identify the exploit and will bring the site back online shortly.”

Update 8: As at 1:25am PST (Jan 26) TechCrunch is STILL offline with the same message as before.

Update 9: 01:45 PST (8:45pm AEDT) still down.

Update 10: 01:50 PDT TC back up

Yes folks it is time for another installment of the tech world’s newest never-ending story in search of increased pageviews. In a move to counter the lawsuit now launched against them Fusion Garage, the company behind the JooJoo (formerly known as the Crunchpad and heralded as the second-coming of the tablet computer web browser), has sent out a response to the allegations brought against it.

Although I wasn’t lucky enough to be included in on the list of bloggers that Fusion Garage figured were big enough to carry their message to the masses the good folks over at Business Insider were so you can either read the original press release over there or you can read our cut and paste version here. Either way you can be sure that this isn’t the end of the story.

FUSION GARAGE RESPONDS TO TECHCRUNCH LAWSUIT AND
DECEMBER 11 BLOG POST BY MICHAEL ARRINGTON
COMPANY STATEMENT
DECEMBER 17, 2009

The lawsuit filed by TechCrunch against Fusion Garage and accompanying December 11, 2009 blog post by Michael Arrington are without merit.   We will vigorously defend ourselves against the suit’s claims in court.  The December 11 blog post by Arrington makes several hollow allegations including:

Lack of Viable Funding/Our Shareholders/Cash Flow:
Fusion Garage is a properly capitalized start up that has received $3M in funding to date and is preparing to announce a new round within the coming weeks.  The Company is a viable concern  whose financial status more than enables it to fully develop and bring to market its intellectual  property commercialized in the form of joojoo. Fusion Garage has various angel investors that are well-respected business people in the Singapore community.  Like many international angel investors, Dr. Bruce Lee is a successful entrepreneur with several profitable ventures.  Additionally, Fusion Garage is proud of the other investors on its rosters – many of whom have invested in previous ventures founded by Rathakrishnan.  Fusion Garage went out and secured funding – tangible proof of Fusion Garage’s “doer” status relative to the alleged yet intangible claims of investment by TechCrunch.  Pre-sales have indeed begun and, with or without them, the Company has sufficient funds to bring the joojoo to market and defend itself against the baseless claims of TechCrunch.

Pegatron IP Ownership:
Another example of Fusion Garage “doer status” in bringing the joojoo to market is the Company’s now defunct relationship with ODM Pegatron.  Fusion Garage established this relationship after Arrington’s promises of hardware development support proved to be hollow. Fusion Garage is now working with another top tier ODM to develop a completely new board and mechanical layout that is the basis for the joojoo. To state, as the lawsuit and accompanying blog post do, that Fusion Garage’s joojoo is based on any Pegatron IP is false.

As for the ongoing personal attacks against Rathakrishnan, they do not deserve a point by point response.  Arrington’s attacks on Rathakrishnan’s past business activities are unfounded.  The points he raises are old news and raise the question of why he would want to do business with Rathakrishnan if his past was so controversial.  Dredging up old and nebulous material only reflects his desperation for material.

Fusion Garage is proud to have introduced the joojoo last week and is equally proud of the positive feedback the product received by industry influencers and media.  We have received more than 6,000  email inquiries to our website and pre-orders to date have exceeded our expectations.   We have no  reason to believe that the legal action taken against Fusion Garage will prevent the joojoo from reaching  market.
Since our first public statements on the joojoo, we have taken the high road regarding past interactions with Arrington and TechCrunch.  We find Arrington’s ongoing attempts to bully public opinion and members of the media to be the sad rants of a person championing a losing cause.

Here are some links to our coverage of the whole mess just in case you need to waste some time and really care about this nonsense in the first place.

CrunchPad Renamed JooJoo, Will Sell For $499 Starting December 11th
Q&A With Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan On The JooJoo
Fusion Garage Fights Back After Lopsided TechCrunch Story. Renames Device “JooJoo”
Things That Don’t Make Sense About The CrunchPad/ JooJoo Story
TechCrunch Files Lawsuit Against Fusion Garage Intellectual Property Rights

Michael Arrington promised to file a lawsuit against JooJoo maker Fusion Garage after their CrunchPad partnership had fallen apart, while Fusion Garage CEO Chander Rathakrishnan promised that no intellectual property was taken from the TechCrunch founder. Now as promised Arrington is taking Fusion Garage to court.

Arrington on Wednesday filed suit against the manufacturer in a Northern District California Court. His complaint says that the CrunchPad (JooJoo) developer was involved in fraud, misappropriation of business ideas and basically “stealing” the project from TechCrunch.

According to Arrington, Ratharkrishanan’s current claims that Arrington owns no IP is incorrect and the TechCrunch founder states that blueprints and much of the devices other IP were originated by Pegatron, the original planned manufacturer for the device.

In true Arrington fashion TechCrunch has launched character attacks against Rathakrishnan, stating that he’s plagiarized content and erased their blog to hide contradictory statements. They also claim that the company is funded by “unsavory” creditors. He has also tried to persuade media companies from linking to the JooJoo pre-order page. In case you missed that he doesn’t want you to CLICK HERE. He says they don’t have the money to build the devices, however in our last interview with Chander he talked about new funding, bringing the total raised to $3 million.

Here’s what we don’t understand, why didn’t a “businessman” like Arrington have contracts in place? Also, he blames Singapore press for not mentioning Rathakrishnan’s previous company failure, however Chander in a web conference last week talked about the failure of that company in a very matter of fact way that any blog who chose to could have reported on.

Not surprisingly the suit asks for a preliminary injunction of the JooJoo from being sold until the case comes to an end. It should be interesting to see all of the contracts, proof of verbal obligations and other “proof” that Arrington can provide.

Here’s my question to Arrington, why did you get into business in the first place with a businessman you appear to have known nothing about, while continuing the relationship when as you put it money was raised by using “unsavory creditors.” You also claim that much of the IP, if in fact true, was taken from another manufacturer? If you knew that fact you had an obligation to address it during the build process. It seems to me that more than one side may have been guilty of unsavory business.

Fusion Garage’s Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan spoke in a press conference today about recent rumors surrounding the “CrunchPad” tablet device. His speech provided some excellent insight into the actual ownership of the tablet, while pulling a 180 degree view based on rumors currently provided by TechCrunch.

Rathakrishnan explained that Fusion Garage had solely developed the products OS without a single line of code being provided by TechCrunch, while also hiring their own employees to develop the products hardware and ultimately finish the complete product. As he put it “Fusion Garage is the actual only doer in this story.”

He also went on to state that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington had started CrunchPad IP with the goal of acquiring Fusion Garage via a majority ownership in the company, a promise that never occurred at any point. Instead Chandra hinted that Arrington’s over zealous attitude may have actually hurt the final product, stating “publishing pictures of an incomplete and unfunded product on a blog was not going to meet terms of future success.”

Further, Arrington, he said, had promised to find investors for the device and introduce Fusion Garage to the proper channels needed to develop and distribute the units. Instead Fusion Garage ended up having to find their own OEM and secure financing outside of Michael Arrington’s assistance. Currently Fusion Garage has arranged $3 million in funding since 2008, with their newest round to be announced shortly.

Rathakrishnan also repeatedly defended the companies prior statements that no contracts were put into place over ownership of the device and that no verbal agreement had given the “assumption” of ownership in any way.

He further went on to show off a video demo of the device which offers a 12.1 inch capacitive touchscreen and boots in only 9 seconds into an in-browser OS.  Fusion Garage has also renamed the device JooJoo, after the African word for “Magic” and have revealed that the device will work “offline” while operating via cloud computing and offering full HD output capabilities.  It will also operate for 5 hours online without a single charge.

Pre-Orders will begin for the Fusion Garage JooJoo on Friday December 11th for $499. Unfortunately that pricing isn’t really in line with Arrington’s $200 price tag which Chandar called “ridiculous” considering the pricing found on iPhone and other “tablet type” devices with much smaller displays.

Given this recent round of information it should be interesting to see how TechCrunch and more specifically Michael Arrington decide to fire back, from my point of view Fusion Garage should have an Epic Win on their hands.

Important Note: The Green Hue on the devices display was caused by the camera shooting the web conference not by the device.

Despite winning a Popular Mechanics award for being one of the “most brilliant” products of 2009 sight-unseen, the mythical CrunchPad TechCrunch tablet has dissolved into a cloud of ill-will and bitchy sniping, much to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Many techy types were skeptical about the hype surrounding the never-existing project- earlier this month, Wired questioned whether the CrunchPad was “still alive.” Vocal through the summer before abruptly shutting up about the CrunchPad, Michael Arrington declined comment on the piece, but up until today did not indicate the the ambitious tablet was in any jeopardy- despite an ever increasing hypothetical price tag, lack of actual product, and looming Apple tablet on the horizon (possibly killing any interest in the CrunchPad to begin with.)

Details behind the implosion aren’t immediately clear- it’s claimed that FusionGarage conveniently booted Arrington/TechCrunch from the project with no warning:

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. [partner and Fusion Garage CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan] said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

But reading the recounting of the events leading up to the death of the project feels incomplete- was it a few days before launch? Are there millions of orphaned CrunchPads sitting in warehouses waiting to be distributed? Or is this just a case of maybe bloggers should stick to blogging and let manufacturers manufacture? Fusion Garage has yet to weigh in on Arrington’s accusations, and a technology consultant spoke to MSNBC about the likelihood that the CrunchPad ever would have seen the light of day:

“The device was actually very interesting, though it was trending to be much too expensive for anyone but an Apple-class vender to sell. Given they set expectations for initial price so low and then were unable to build a device that would meet those expectations I doubt the device would have been very successful.”

Tech blog TechCrunch and search engine minnow Yahoo may have signed a secret search deal that sees TechCrunch search results offered on default Yahoo searches for tech startups.

There has been no public disclosure of the deal that we have been able to find, and asking for comment would be like asking Iran to embrace Israel, so we only have the evidence to go on.

TechCrunch implemented Yahoo Search BOSS in November 2008. In a glowing review, the site wrote about the positives BOSS provided. By itself, the implementation doesn’t stand out, and given the post was written by former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson (who as far as I’m concerned is beyond reproach), there was nothing in the works then of something more.

But as pointed out to me privately over the weekend, Yahoo appears to have returned the favor, in a fashion that offers a lot more for TechCrunch than they are giving in return by running BOSS on their search page (in the above shot, we searched for brizzly.) While we can’t be 100% sure that Yahoo didn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart, the chances of that being the case are slim at best. Couple to that Michael Arrington’s constant criticism of Yahoo’s leadership, and the inclusion of TechCrunch as a Yahoo search option becomes even less likely to be something simply done for the love of an occasionally great tech post.

There’s also a post by Erick Schonfield in August 2009 claiming that “Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing.” I’m sure that the TechCrunch crew like BOSS, but the cheering for the service vs the otherwise negative coverage of Yahoo seems a little odd. I don’t know when Yahoo started offering TechCrunch as a search option, but you get the feeling that there was a strong relationship between the Yahoo Search team and TechCrunch in recent months.

To some degree, I’d say that congratulations to Michael Arrington and the TechCrunch team are in order, because what ever they’ve managed to pull off will be a huge boost for the site. Yahoo may be the search minnow, but as we’ve seen in our own stats at The Inquisitr recently, they still have the ability to drive some really good traffic. I’m sure with the fullness of time though that Michael Arrington will disclose one way or the other the details of the close relationship Yahoo and TechCrunch now have.

Technology blog VentureBeat has announced this morning at the DEMO conference that it has acquired crowd sourced company database startup Tradevibes for an undisclosed sum.

VentureBeat is renaming the service VentureBeatProfiles, and selling the new incarnation as a platform to “discover, research, and share information and opinions about companies.” Along with the core TradeVibes data and platform, VentureBeat is promising that the site will become even better — “making it much more useful to the hundreds of thousands of users that visit VentureBeat each month.” Additional features include support for press releases and conversation tracking.

The acquisition of Tradevibes by VentureBeat is being pitched as positioning VentureBeat as a serious challenger to TechCrunch. Why you’d want to challenge TechCrunch to begin with is interesting, but likewise the parallels are obvious: VentureBeat now organizes the DEMO conference (vs TechCrunch with TechCrunch 50), both sites write about serious startups…well, VentureBeat does more often, both sites compete for the attention of the Silicon Valley tech community, and now both sites sport a company database.

Tradevibes parent company Mill River Labs was funded by a $900,000 round in March 2008 from investors incuding Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, Dave McClure, and the Kinsey Hills Group. The company has struggled at times due to its emphasis on crowd sourcing data vs creating it in-house, however its smart outreach in providing joint sites has positioned it as a worthy player in the space.

Disclosure: we have a relationship with Tradevibes for the provision of Qbase (see “Company Database) in the nav bar.

I promised myself I’d stop taking shots at Techcrunch, it’s not healthy and I’ve moved on, but as I choked on my breakfast this morning I’ve decided to relent, because the man who put Ashton Kutcher on stage at what was suppose to be a serious tech conference is now asking that Silicon Valley doesn’t become like Hollywood.

You can’t make this stuff up: my old boss Michael Arrington is not only rallying against Hollywood (as he pisses his pants in excitement over Penn and Teller doing TechCrunch 50 next week), but he’s actually written that he doesn’t want people to pitch him. Did I say already that I’m not making this up?

But like a poorly written business plan, or should I say declaring TechCrunch 50 sold out when your third party ticket outlet was still selling tickets based on your own availability data, Arrington plays the I’m god card, saying ” As Silicon Valley gets bigger, with more strangers, it actually becomes harder to reach the power structure that can make your startup go from a business plan to reality.” Does that make Arrington the Catholic Church?

You see, you should only ever pitch TechCrunch if you have a startup at exactly 1.457944569879458 into its development cycle. Pitching outside of that stage of your development means you want to paint Michael’s house… or something.

People regularly tell me that they miss the old TechCrunch, and despite what Arrington may think I still defend the site to some degree: the market has changed, and TechCrunch has changed with it. But when Michael Arrington writes a post that basically tells people who want to pitch him to fuck off, and that the Valley is turning into Hollywood despite he himself suckling the celebrity teet at the second its dangled in front of him, the plot is lost and TechCrunch has passed from great site to a self imposed cess pool powered on nothing more than Michael’s ego.

Farewell TechCrunch, we loved you so.

TechCrunch writer Daniel Brusilovsky, the 16 year old wunderkid behind the TechCrunch pumped “Teens in Tech” Wordpress MU blog network has been fibbing about usage numbers on his site.

Brusilovsky has previously claimed publicly that Teens in Tech had over 10,000 registered users, a reasonable sort of number for a very basic WordPress MU setup. It turns out though that the number is more than a slight exaggeration: the MU install was hacked with the real data found its way to Net News Daily.

The complete number of registered users (this figure includes inactive members): 421. Turns out that Daniel not only added a zero to the end of the actual number, but doubled it again just for good measure.

I don’t know a lot about Daniel besides always thinking it was very strange that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was pumping a very basic blog network that would only appear to stand out from hundreds of other small scale unfunded blog networks because Daniel was 15 when he started it. I do have it on good authority though from someone who has dealt with him that he’s not a bad kid and has some talent.

The lesson here is that if you boast about site numbers, the numbers you quote should have some reflection in reality because if they don’t, eventually someone will find out.

Twitter may be planning to sue TechCrunch over the publication of stolen internal documents (Twittergate), according to multiple sites.

The conjecture is simply that at this stage, with Twitter not exactly saying that they’d like Michael Arrington’s rear end on toast, however the company has made hints in that direction.

“We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter…and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents” co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog. “We’re not sure yet exactly what the implications are for folks who choose to get involved at this point but when we learn more and are able to share more, we will.”

TechCrunch is now claiming that they published the documents with the permission of Twitter…which is more than a little bit bizarre given what Biz wrote and unlikely: no company in their right mind would approve of another site publishing stolen documents that detail highly confidential internet business plans and corporate information.

The publication of stolen internal documents from Twitter on TechCrunch and other sites has raised serious questions about the ethics and legality of doing so.

If you’ve missed the story so far, a French hacker obtained access to multiple accounts held by Twitter employees including co-founder Ev Williams. Using this access, the hacker obtain numerous internal documents that showed company projections, plans for a Twitter reality show, and a lot more.

Dubbed #Twittergate on Twitter, a majority of those offering opinions on Twitter about the publication of the documents have been against their publication. The Wall Street Journal chimes in on the ethics side, and notes Twitter comments such as “Bad juju, TechCrunch. Not ethical to post ANY hacked confidential docs” and “Industrial espionage, cloud hacking, skating on the edge of journalistic ethics: #twittergate has everything!’” “This is the dark side of Silicon Valley.”

Michael Arrington’s only defense so far is to say that whatever lands in his inbox is fair game and to say that other sites do it, so why shouldn’t he. He also flips the negatives around by saying that “Hopefully this situation will encourage Google and Google users to consider more robust data security policies in the future.”

In saying that I agree with the concerns of many over the publication of the information, I can only do so in the context that the issue isn’t black and white. Arrington is right in saying that other publications print this material (notably mainstream media outlets often do as well) but that in itself does not make the decision to publish the documents right.

The bigger question is whether there was a public interest in publishing stolen material that included clearly personal information on employees along with corporate documents (the material included shots of Ev Williams’ Facebook account.) You might be able to mount some defense around the corporate documents, but Ev’s Facebook account doesn’t even come close. Secondly by publishing the documents there may be some legal issues given that they have been illegally obtained; although the liability doesn’t fall with the site publishing the material for the theft itself, the publication of said documents may constitute an offense in a similar way to possessing stolen physical goods.

Hoggworks Studios have followed on from their Colbert puppet series with a puppet parody of Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg.

In this episode the Mossberg puppet rips Google Chrome OS and TechCrunch. I was tempted not to post it as we don’t want to hate to much on TechCrunch, but if Arrington friends like Business Insider are posting it, it must be ok.

Warning on the video: language NSFW, but otherwise some pretty good laughs.

In our blogging 101 series, I’ve spoken regularly about the need to continually review what you’re writing to best find things that work. Einstein said that the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and the same holds true for blogs: yes, it takes time to establish a blog, but likewise there’s no point going on forever if it’s not working.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a man I can say many things about (despite rumors, most of them positive), but there’s one trait I’ve always admired in Michael, and that’s his constant drive to work out what works, and change on an ongoing basis. Stats for TechCrunch are notoriously hard to come by (they’re blocked in Quantcast for example), but Alexa shows that from around May last year, TechCrunch’s traffic and rank started to slide. There was an improvement in November, but only to levels below pre-May. Stagnant probably isn’t the right word, because TechCrunch on a bad day does more page views than most sites out there, but certainly there was no growth.

Come late March, the chart started heading north. As of today, TechCrunch has risen from around 6,000 in Alexa to just outside the top 1000. Obama was elected in January, but in April change came to TechCrunch. So what changed?

Repositioning to PoptweetCrunch

PoptweetCrunch is a name used by some observers privately to describe the change at TechCrunch starting in late March, but fully taking hold in April. Sensing a trend in the market, Arrington smartly called that posts about Twitter, sometimes mixed in with celebrities was a great way to build traffic. He hired the very capable MG Siegler, who had gotten a name for himself as a consumer oriented tech writer at VentureBeat, and gave him the primary task of writing about Twitter. Siegler does do other posts (his critics may not agree), but he’s the chief Twitter correspondent for lack of a better term. With Siegler on board, TechCrunch has thrived.

The results from the new mix of content don’t just show itself on Alexa, but on other services as well. Posts about Twitter are heavily retweeted over non-Twitter posts from TechCrunch, and this helps drive traffic. On the small but popular with a few meme tracker Techmeme, TechCrunch has risen from under 6% of all mentions, to nearly 9% today, and will likely go past 10% in the near future. Some have suggested that the close personal relationship between Techmeme’s owner and MG Seigler helps in this regard, but I believe that to be unfair: any idea that Techmeme is fair and impartial to begin with has long been dismissed, and I don’t believe that MG Seigler would get more favors than other sites and writers that are favored by the site, over those not in the club. Further: the drop in VentureBeat’s Techmeme ranking is somewhat mirrored in the rise of TechCrunch with MG on board.

All in all the repositioning of the site has been a huge success in terms of traffic and in bringing in new readers, and you can’t dispute that.

Mistakes

The success though of the move to PoptweetCrunch hasn’t been seamless, and there’s some good lessons in this for all sites.

The change hasn’t been universally embraced by long term readers. Any change any site makes is always going to have dissent, no matter how much you try. The marginal cost of losing old readers at TechCrunch has been the gain of more new readers, so from a business perspective it makes perfect sense.

Here’s what I would have done though to somewhat appease older readers: I would have offered a clean feed. Maybe not lots of feeds (and in retrospect, that was an mistake we made here at The Inquisitr), but a separate feed called “startup news.” That way you could offer a feed to long term readers who only wanted to read about startup news, and who didn’t want to read about Kanye West and Twitter.

Commenting policy is an issue: TechCrunch has gone from one extreme to the other in comment censorship, and that does alienate some people. When I started my 12 month stint there, comments were never deleted, a policy I believe today to be the wrong one. But likewise, dissent on posts is regularly deleted on TechCrunch now, not just the extreme stuff, but more moderate views. I should note that they still do leave some dissent up there, and in that regard the implementation is very hit and miss. Michael Arrington once told me to ignore the commenters, but today TechCrunch doesn’t ignore them enough. TechCrunch should make a clear (or clearer) commenting policy that is a little more open to dissent, but within reason.

Conclusion

If one of the biggest tech blogs in the land feels the need to shift focus to drive traffic, it should be a sign to other blogs that shifting isn’t a sign of defeat, but an opportunity waiting to happen. Try new things, give up on old things if they aren’t working, and ultimately work out what works best for your site.

(image: lalawag)

The pecking order in the web 2.0/ social media blogging space is about to have its biggest shake up in years, with Mashable set to overtake rival TechCrunch.

Web tracking stats show that Mashable is just behind, or in one case ahead of TechCrunch. Alexa, Compete and Quantcast show TechCrunch in the lead, but only by small margins; comScore, a long favorite tracking service for TechCrunch shows that Mashable has more unique visitors, and is ahead on pageviews by a very small margin.

Mashable has been on a roll over the last year, with a depth of writers and content bringing back readers. Their story is an unlikely one, but likewise representative of what the web can achieve. Founder Peter Cashmore started the blog in his native Scotland at a relatively young age, with little experience in the field vs Michael Arrington who was previously involved in startups.

Here’s the break down.

comScore

Compete

Alexa

Quantcast

Note on Quantcast: unlike Mashable, TechCrunch hides its stats from public view, except for the total people count.