The Inquisitr » techcrunch

TechCrunch Yahoo search deal: TechCrunch now offered as default on Yahoo Search

Duncan Riley — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:37:11 +0000

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.

VentureBeat acquires Tradevibes

Duncan Riley — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:20:12 +0000

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.

The man who put Ashton Kutcher on stage claims the Valley shouldn’t be like Hollywood

Duncan Riley — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:01:41 +0000

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 caught fibbing about startup numbers

Duncan Riley — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:04:16 +0000

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 to sue TechCrunch? they should do it for the lulz

Duncan Riley — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:51:05 +0000

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.

Is Publishing Stolen Twitter Documents Fair Game?

Duncan Riley — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:37:04 +0000

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.

Mossberg Puppet rips Chrome OS, TechCrunch

Duncan Riley — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:09:58 +0000

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.

What TechCrunch teaches us about repositioning a blog

Duncan Riley — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:38:56 +0000

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)

Mashable poised to overtake TechCrunch as leading 2.0 blog by traffic

Duncan Riley — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:27:02 +0000

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.

Lets face it: you don’t matter

Duncan Riley — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 03:49:28 +0000

A broad spectrum of tech blogs have flapped this week over the Twitter recommended users list, prompted by a $120,000 offer by Jason Calacanis to get on it.

Those against the list argue that it’s unfair, and unjustly gives priority to some users rather than others. Even Twitter investor Fred Wilson thinks it should be done better.

Here’s the problem: the presumption is made on the false belief that what you think matters to Twitter. It doesn’t.

Twitter joins a long list of companies that virtually c*^k suck the A-list and others they think will get them ahead than actually really care about what 99.99% of the rest of their users think. FriendFeed has been recommending A-listers since it launched, many who never use the service. Despite regular protests by users, they’ve never changed it. Why? because they don’t give a shit about you either.

Pick your service. RSS Readers and web desktops add TechCrunch as a standard feed to curry favor with Michael Arrington, who recently found God in Hawaii. They don’t recommend your site because you don’t matter to them, and they don’t care about you either.

Is it fair? they don’t care!

I’m sympathetic to the complaints to a point, but complaining does nothing with most of the these companies because they know in the most that you’re not going to stop using them, so you don’t count…you don’t matter.

Want to rage against the machine and change the system? good luck, most people are apathetic and couldn’t care less. The only way to change things if you feel strongly enough is to start your own startup and promise to do it better.

How to lose friends and anger people the TechCrunch way

Duncan Riley — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:22:40 +0000

Chris Shipley, the extraordinarily hard working executive producer of the bi-annual DEMO conference is stepping down this year, and taking over is Matt Marshall, founder of VentureBeat.

During Shipley’s reign at DEMO, the conference has served as an exception launch pad for tech startups and services, including well known names including Salesforce.com, TiVO, VMWare, WebEx, Palm Pilot and many, many more. I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Shipley, but those that have nearly exclusively talk Shipley’s overwhelming commitment to the business, and the amazing job she has done.

DEMO of course today has competition from the TechCrunch 50 conference, a 2 year old annual event that showcase startups fee free on stage, but charges for a massive demo pit and every other part of the conference. Rivalry and competition can be healthy, but from very early on TechCrunch 50 was promoted as a conference primarily focused on killing DEMO. What is a decent conference highlighting some amazing startups became quickly polluted by hate filled rhetoric aimed at DEMO, where as it could, and should be able to stand on its merits alone.

With Michael Arrington taking a month off, you’d think that maybe TechCrunch would maybe back off on the attacks. Add to this a “TechCrunch friend” in Matt Marshall taking over (VentureBeat partners TechCrunch in the Crunchies); a perfect opportunity to bury the hatchet and show some respect.

But you’d be wrong.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schnofield took the opportunity to double the venom in a little exercise of how to lose friends and anger people.

Class is a word completely lost on Schonfield. In attacking the opposition and calling them desperate, TechCrunch looks like the ones who are desperate.

Allen Stern gets it right with “Wait a Moment… Who is the Desperate One?”

In a very tight market, this sort of venom coming out of TechCrunch can and will hurt them when the conference comes around. They should be selling the event on merit, but instead they are damaging it with this rubbish.

The proof: the comments and widespread commentary on the post. There’s not a lot of people sticking up for TechCrunch over this, but plenty who are criticizing it, including previous supporters.

Best of luck to Shipley in what ever is next, and we look forward to catching some of DEMO online in March.

How long will Sarah Lacy last at TechCrunch? (poll)

Duncan Riley — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:51:27 +0000

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington announced February 1 that during his break from the site due to spitting and stalking incidents, Sarah Lacy will be taking his role.

It’s odd that four days a later I’m writing about this now, but I just read an extremely well written post from Sarah about user generated content, and for some reason I immediately thought of the question.

Sarah is one of those people who does split opinions. I had the pleasure of meeting her last year at Gnomedex, and although I didn’t dislike her before (I’d read the controversy though like everyone else) I walked away highly impressed. Here’s a woman (lady may be sexist, but more fitting) who isn’t afraid to share an opinion, but does it with grace, in a dress of teflon. She’s extraordinarily bright, engaging, and good value, and I don’t say those words easily.

But even that tough veneer faces a serious challenge at TechCrunch. Dare I say it, but the so-called leading Web 2.0/ startup blog is no place for a lady. In saying that I’m not suggesting that woman can’t do the job, I’m saying that woman get lynched on TechCrunch without fail.

Natalia Del Conte, another highly talented presenter and writer lasted weeks at TechCrunch back in 2006. It wasn’t that she was a bad writer (although her tone obviously was different to that of Michael’s), a lot of the nastiness seemed to come about from some sort of misogynist view that women can’t write tech. I’m not saying that some of the criticism may have not been fair, and people are entitled to disagree, but the commenters on TechCrunch ripped Natalia to shreds in a nearly unbelievable fashion.

I didn’t follow the next female writer closely, but from what I can gather she received a similar response. TechCrunch in the second half of 2008 and today is different though to when I was there or when Natalia was there: Arrington now actively deletes comments and bans commenters, but even then it’s difficult to filter them all

Sarah is opinionated, and that’s going to be a red rag to a bull, even more so than the opinions offered by Arrington. That she has a teflon suit is a given, but if the TechCrunch commenters go as hard as they did on Natalia on Sarah, that teflon may fail.

I do wish Sarah the best of luck at TechCrunch, and I’ll even make an effort to link to her stuff there where appropriate. The question now though is how long she’ll last.

Here’s the poll.

Blog War! Arrington blames AllThingsD, Valleywag for hate campaign

Duncan Riley — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:38:28 +0000

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has publicly named Valleywag, and AllThingD as leading the hate campaign that led to him being spat on in Germany, and stalked.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (which owns AllThingsD) Arrington said that while no particular site urged him specific harm, “a handful of tech blogs… have published matter that damaged my site’s reputation, including AllThingsD.com” and Valleywag.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, someone we hold in high regard here, denied any connection. “Our site is trying to raise ethical and reporting standards in the tech blogosphere but is in no way responsible for people stalking Michael Arrington. To say so is truly unfortunate on his part,” she said. “I am appalled he is being stalked, which is scary and disturbing, and am sorry for the strife it has clearly caused him and his family.”

I not long ago wrote a post where I’d hoped that Michael looked inward in regard to his current issues; that he continues to blame others is part and parcel of the problem.

Michael Arrington: the world isn’t black and white

Duncan Riley — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:16:24 +0000

Much of the blogosphere, and even the mainstream press (Asher Moses at The Age has one of the best posts up) is buzzing about a post from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington where Arrington claims that he’s had enough after being stalked and spat on.

Let me say upfront that the stalking and spitting is most definitely a step to far, that no blogger should have to put up with that, and in that regard he has my sympathies.

But it’s the fine print where the story lets me down. In Michael’s world, people are out to get him, because TechCrunch didn’t write about their startup (on the spitting incident “some unhappy European entrepreneur we didn’t write about”) or because they are jealous and/ or competitors (”my peers will realize that competitive pressures do not give them carte blanche to accuse us and others of literally anything that pops into their head”).

Quite simply, it’s Michael’s attitude to others that is at the very heart of the problem.

My own run in with Arrington is a case in point. I left TechCrunch on a reasonable note, Michael wrote a nice post (since deleted I might add) and I was even doing a couple of guest posts a week for the first month. Then I signed a deal with a small startup that in a very remote way competed with Crunchbase. I honestly believed at the time that it wouldn’t be an issue, the one on one comparison was so minor, and even the day before I got my fuck off email I’d been sending story tips through to Michael, and even working with one of their new writers helping him get established.

The email from Michael claimed that I was out to get them. In Michael’s world, you’re 100% agree with him, or you’re 100% against him. Michael made some other allegations that I’d been negative about TechCrunch to that point; I’d written one, maybe two posts where I disagreed with stuff on TechCrunch, but as anyone around me will testify, to that day I’d always spoken publicly and privately positively about my time working for Michael.

This is but one example, but it’s an example of how Michael operates. I considered him well to that point, and this is the way he treats someone who worked his arse off for him for 12 months, 7 days a week, with one very short break (I left because the pay wasn’t worth the cost on my health). God help the people who really are anti-Arrington, and the lashing they’ve received. Michael pushes people away who can and would support him, and makes enemies of those who want to support him, but may not always agree with him 100% of the time.

But I digress, because there are other clues here as to the root cause of the problem. The spitting incident for example: Michael immediately presumes that it was a startup person who didn’t get a review, but the far more likely reason is Michael’s anti-European startup comments at LeWeb. That those around him didn’t offer assistance shows what many who follow the European blogosphere and startup community were reading: Arrington is hated on the continent because of what he said about them, absolutely nothing to do with a startup reviews or competition.

There’s also this presumption from Michael that people in the United States hate him for similar reasons: not getting a review, or being in competition. That this may hold true for some is a given, but a few don’t make a majority. People aren’t jealous of Michael, in fact why would they be: long hours, lots of stress, and he gets stalked and spat on. If anything, those who still hold any good will towards him (and part of me does, despite our stoush) are actually concerned more than anything: his lashing out has created an atmosphere were he has become hated, as we see now to an extreme point. But lets be clear on the why: it’s not because of TechCrunch the blog, and his competitive posts, or because competitors want to bring him down (which I’d note, really, TechCrunch has few real competitors anyway); the problem stems from the way he deals with others.

I mean this quite sincerely, but I hope that he uses his time off (which I’d note is long overdue anyway), to realize that the world isn’t black and white, and that not everyone is out to get him. I’ve seen the good, generous, kind, engaging and interesting sides of Michael, and I realize the pressure he is under, but change has come to America, and change needs to come to the empire of Arrington. There’s a good guy in there still, I just hope that side wins out. As a commenter on Valleywag pointed out: Om Malik doesn’t attract this negative attention. I hope the good Michael returns, and we’d be all the better off to see it once again. I know I miss that side of him, as do many of those who once knew him, but were pushed away, do.

YawnTwitter Search MemeYawn

Duncan Riley — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 09:42:23 +0000

There’s apparently a flap this weekend over a suggestion from Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur that Twitter should have authority search based on the number of followers a user has.

I can see why people are upset, and I sympathize strongly withe the arguments against the proposal. The thing is, the debate fails on my official patented importance meter. I’ve tried adjusting the nobs and I’ve recalibrated it a couple of times, but the result is the same every time.

Who gives a shit.

You know the news cycle is quiet when this is the biggest story of the day. It’s really not that important. If Twitter did implement it, it won’t be the end of the world, and most people wouldn’t notice, care, or use the feature anyway.

Oh, and it won’t happen either. After all, Twitter couldn’t even get search right in the first place, so they had to acquire a company that was offering Twitter search. Unless there’s a 3rd party Twitter tool provider by the name of “elitist people search for Twitter” I’m not aware of they can buy to do it, I’m ranking this dead in the water…or should that be Loic’s Perrier.

Surely there’s something better to write about, for example how Loic and Michael just played you all for suckers

2009 Will Be The Year of the Uber Blog

Duncan Riley — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 04:46:14 +0000

As we end 2008, the year ahead offers the biggest challenge ever in the history of blogging.

Although blogging dates back to the beginning of the first dot com boom, it truly came of age as the second bubble grew. From the rise of the political bloggers in 2004, blogging became mainstream, and with that came money and commercialism.

Blogging is more than its commercial endeavors, and as a non-commercial platform for networking, global communication and sharing blogging has many great days ahead of it, and may actually boom in 2009 after a dip in popularity over 2007 and 2008 as social networks became a first choice of communications and networking outlet for many.

But the commercial side of blogging is facing a difficult year. The same issues that face the broader Tech and Web 2.0 spheres face blogging: a dearth of VC, declining ad revenues, and even tougher competition as many try to compensate for lower ad revenues by driving even more traffic.

The dangers for commercial blog owners come on a number of fronts, but there’s one trend we’ve already seen begin.

The rise of the Uber Blog

Some may moan at the use of the word uber, so feel free to substitute it with big or large, because the meaning remains the same. An Uber Blog is a blog that combines different content streams into one large blog, with one primary top level url. The Huffington Post is an example I’ve used before. The blending of content can be in related fields, or non related fields; for example, you might blend specialties in tech into the one tech blog.

It has already begun

In a post asking whether the blog network model is dying, I made similar observations on a number of companies, some I’ll repeat here

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb has gone from a traditional blog network in to the uber blog model. Owner Richard McManus gave away or sold the two blogs in the network, at the same time he was launching new blogs under the ReadWriteWeb brand. The reason given by Richard: a focus on the core brand.

Silicon Alley Insider

Henry Blodget merged the two blogs outside of Silicon Alley Insider into sub-urls on alleyinsider.com. While each blog maintains their own name and heading, they are now all parts of alleyinsider itself as opposed to standalone blogs.

Gawker Media

In between selling blogs, Nick Denton merged Valleywag into Gawker on a sub-url. Valleywag keeps its header and name, but is now a column of Gawker.

b5media

b5media hasn’t yet started blending blogs into larger blogs, but has instead undertaken a variation of the theme: branded portals. Content from b5media’s business and celebrity channels fall under the banner of a larger site, which also acts as a gateway to the content.

Why one large blog?

The reasoning behind the move is remarkably simple: it’s easy to sell ads on one blog vs many blogs, for a couple of reasons. The biggest is simply traffic: having one big blog means increased traffic to the core blog making the sales pitch more appealing. Second, advertisers will often want to target the one blog and not buy the subsidiary blogs; maybe not always, but none the less common in my experience. If you have one big blog with various streams you’ve got better odds of getting high value advertising against all the content.

Expanding outside the niche

Having sub blogs within a large blog, or amalgamating smaller blogs gives commercial blog operators the ability to broaden their content range outside of a specific niche, often with the advantage of not necessarily polluting the core product. The content for example on Silicon Alley Insider and ReadWriteWeb’s sub-blogs is complimentary, and allows both sites to increase content outside the core sites focus, driving growth and new visitors to the product as whole.

Three companies that haven’t blended blogs but could or should

TechCrunch

Michael Arrington followed the typical blog network route with the TechCrunch blogs, launching new sites on new urls. The problem with the network is that it has never produced a hit that has come close to TechCrunch itself. Excluding the country specific sites that site on the techcrunch.com url (except Japan), sites like CrunchGear haven’t delivered (for reference, with a yearly budget that wouldn’t cover one months wages at CrunchGear, we have more traffic according to Quantcast). CrunchGear though isn’t a bad site, it just lacks for eyeballs because it’s not part of TechCrunch itself. Perfect candidate for a sub-blog, like crunchgear.techcrunch.com. The same goes for Mobile and Enterprise. Despite his dislike of me, Arrington is a smart bloke, and I’d bet we see at least one of these sites blended this year, if not all of them.

GigaOm

Om Malik has been buying blogs in a tight market, expanding his network at a time most others aren’t. The unique thing about the network is that gigaom.com doesn’t dominate it, accounting for 31.7% of traffic vs second place TheAppleBlog with 26.9%. However, a number of small blogs would appear to be struggling alone, and would make prime candidates for folding into the leading site.

AOL Weblogs Inc

AOL has continued to go wide, aggressively expanding the network they acquired from Jason Calacanis 4 year ago. AOL does have a couple of obvious strengths: the ability to sell ads across the network, and the leverage of AOL.com to pump new sites. They have already though started to group sites around key brands such as Engadget, and I’d suggest in a tightening market that grouping, being it masthead or subdomains/ sub blogs could come into play in 2009.

Conclusion

In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one url.

The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media. The thing holding back new media to date has been its obsession with niche plays that didn’t naturally lead to scale that sets them up well to compete with old media titans that went wide online as they did offline in print. The new media uber blogs of 2009 and beyond will offer real substitution of old media like we haven’t really seen before, and with lean structures that are best placed to last the recession, could ultimately emerge on top.

Michael Arrington: Evil Genius

Duncan Riley — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:53:46 +0000

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington writes today that he’s tired of the running joke that is the PR embargo system and that they won’t be respecting embargoes in the future except from a handful of trusted PR firms.

He claims that TechCrunch never breaks embargoes, which is completely untrue I might add (they broke the Mahalo story embargo this week by about 20 minutes), but then goes moral on the broken system and why they’re no longer going to play unless they get posts exclusively.

I can’t help at first glance but agree with the points he makes: the system is broken, most PR reps do nothing to enforce embargoes and we’ve actually had a policy in place here for some time that we ask PR reps who regularly don’t enforce embargoes on stories we spend time on to remove us from their list (AOL is one company we no longer cover for example).

But that’s not the real intention of the post. Strip away the moral indignation and you get a very clever play to get TechCrunch more content.

You see if most of TechCrunch’s main competitors wrote that they would ignore embargoes in the future, they’d find their inboxes slowly dry up as PR reps exclude them from pre-briefs and embargoed distributions. But TechCrunch is different. PR firms compete for headlines on TechCrunch, and are regularly told by their clients that they must get a post on TechCrunch, and I know this from having spoken to PR reps during my time writing for TechCrunch, and even more recently.

The decision to ignore embargoes by TechCrunch may mean they miss out on a few stories, but the real result will be that TechCrunch will be offered more exclusives, and TechCrunch’s competitors will miss out on a fair shot of running the story at the same time.

Moral indignation as a ploy to get more exclusive stories and drive more traffic. Touche Michael, Touche. Brilliant play. Evil Genius.

The business of Social Media and the new old boy’s network

Steven Hodson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:11:44 +0000

Just to make sure we have the parameters of this discussion straightened out right from the beginning there are two aspect to this whole social media rigmarole. The first aspect is the actual online world that is social media. It is about interaction with others using a wide ranging set of tools and services. That is not what this post is about.

The second aspect is the business of social media. From the promotion of services and software through to the funding of social media type start-ups this is a multi-million dollar business. Hell it could be a multi-billion dollar business if you fall for the paper valuation of stuff like Facebook. At its core though this business of social media is a relatively small group of very rich and/or powerful people.

Part of this inner circle are a number of equally powerful bloggers who have done very nicely for themselves off of social media – the online environment. While their blog properties carry an immense amount of weight both in the environment; and the business side, it is the names of the people involved with those blogs that are the real cash.

The problem is that this real A-List of social media power brokers is really no different that the old boys network that surrounds old media; or even old business. Even though the idea of blogging is about openness, transparency and disclosure this new old boy’s network practices something much different.

A perfect case in point is the news surrounding Circle of Moms. On December 4th two post written by authors that weren’t really associated by the respective blogs wrote about the amazing numbers that Circle of Moms was getting. Now Circle of Moms originated as a Facebook application but in October launched a parenting website presumably built around the same concept as the Facebook app.

TechCrunch, one of the two sites referenced, brought Nick Gonzalez out of blogging semi-retirement to pitch the news about this wondrous event. The other blog to post about this was Mashable who had Jennifer Van Grove; a Social Media Strategist, write up their version of this ground breaking news.

And what was the news you might ask?

Well apparently since launching in October this mommy site had amazingly enough acquired 850,000+ members. The interesting thing is that this number is pretty close to the number of installed Circle of Moms widget on Facebook.

Now I am going through all this because what comes next is important and knowing some background will be helpful; I believe, in you being able to see what is happening.

Interesting enough on searching through Techmeme on the the day that these posts went live shows nothing as far as buzz happening. I looked through every hour after and it was until 3:50 AM EST that anything showed up. However it was enough to catch the eye of the blogger behind The Drama 2.0 Show who with some journalistic chops that old media would be proud of did some digging and fact checking on this news.

Now this is where this story starts to get really interesting so hang in there. In the case of TechCrunch and Nick Gonzalez there is some interesting undisclosed connections between Mr. Arrington, Gonzalez and the people behind Circle of Moms. It turns out that Nick Gonzalez works for a company called Social Media which bills itself as a social advertising network that sells ads for widget and application developers.

It also turns out that Social Media’s CEO one Seth Goldstein is friends with the founder of Circle of Moms – Ephram Luft. As well Naval Ravikant as investor in Social Media is an investor in Circle of Moms.

So what is the take away from this simple set of facts?

Nick Gonzalez is an employee of Social Media for which he is probably getting a nice paycheck. Social Media his employer pays him as a result of money invested in them by the same person with interests in Circle of Moms. Now tie this in with the fact that Ravikant, Goldstein and Luft are listed as friends of Michael Arrignton on Facebook which as The Dramma 2.0 Show blog shows Mr. Arrington has a personal connection with all the people involved.

Does any of this matter?

It wouldn’t matter one bit if Arrington through his ownership of TechCrunch and association with the involved parties has publicly declared his conflicts of interest in this. After all isn’t that the most basic tenet of this new media – disclosure and transparency. Well we didn’t see any of that here and this isn’t the first time that questions have been raised about this type of thing with TechCrunch.

Now what about the other shoe – how about dropping it now?

This one isn’t as complex a circle as with TechCrunch but as The Drama 2.0 Show blog found out Mashable isn’t without some ethical questions that need to be asked.

For example the writer of the wondrous news as it appeared on Mashable is one Jennifer Van Grove who as she says on her own site – a community and social media consultant (a cutsey phrase for marketer). So it is her business to write posts like this and wouldn’t you know it she’s listed as a friend of Luft on Facebook.

However one has to point out as well that Pete Cashmore; like Mr. Arrington, is listed as a friend of both Luft and Ravikant as well on Facebook.

As with TechCrunch this involvement by Mashable’s owner Pete Cashmore and new writer Jennifer Van Grove with people surrounding Circle of Moms is something that was never disclosed by anyone involved.

Perhaps this is all just a hinky coincidence?

Sure and I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in. While I’m not going to get my head sized for a tin foil hat by any means one has to really wonder what is being gained by two puff pieces about a website with some highly questionable numbers being bandied about. As many of the commenters on the TechCrunch post pointed out – the numbers don’t make sense.

For me though the more important point to possibly be made here is how the business of social media is potentially being manipulated. Sure Facebook is all about networking and increasing your number of friends. What it shouldn’t be is a meeting ground of the social media power set so that they can create possible false impressions of success or failure because behind all this some-one’s money is being screwed with.

Not to mention that the very people we want to believe in this new media – our readers – won’t appreciate being played like this. Which means we pay the price and the whole basis of what the social media environment is based on is screwed.

But hey – the rich get richer, the powerful get their ego’s fed and the new old boy’s network will continue to grow.

The Techmeme Myth

Duncan Riley — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:02:50 +0000

Is Techmeme influential, a driver of traffic and a unbiased source of the best tech news online? The tech meme aggregator founded by Gabe Rivera in 2005 has long been held up as one of the best sites in the tech blogosphere. As a business, Rivera has done extremely well from it, charging a rumored $3000-$4000 per ad on the site, while remaining a one man setup.

But is it really that great based on evidence? BusinessWeek named Rivera in its list of The 25 Most Influential People on the Web in September with the headline The Traffic Driver: Gabe Rivera. As best we can on available information, we would suggest that the influence, traffic and impartial nature of Techmeme is a myth.

Foreword

The moment I so much as mention Techmeme in a post I will be accused of having an agenda, so lets start with the key points. I was a long term reader of Techmeme, and my first blog was indexed by the site. Over the years I spent a lot of time on Techmeme, and even had the pleasure of meeting Gabe in person last year for first time. Then something strange happened; I stopped getting headlines on Techmeme. More details can be found in Life after Techmeme, but what I missed in that post was noting (along with my falling out with Michael Arrington) that at the same time I stopped getting headlines on Techmeme, I wrote a post (which actually made Techmeme) titled Techmeme and the Noise Problem. I don’t believe in coincidences.

We’ve had a few stray headlines since that time, but at no where near the rate before. Rivera claimed publicly that nothing had changed, and that The Inquisitr had stopped writing posts that were worthy of inclusion, a claim backed by others (one Canadian writer with a long term agenda against me came in hard). As it turned out, our last full month with Techmeme headlines was our worst month on record. The Inquisitr has actually averaged 300-400% more traffic then we did that month (sometimes higher) and has had more links than it ever has. If anything, we are better off without the Techmeme links.

Rivera has continued to accuse me of being “a liar” both publicly and privately ever since, but has never once provided proof that the weight given to Inquisitr headlines wasn’t changed. Around 1-2 weeks ago (I can’t be sure of the timing as it was pointed out to me by more than one person) The Inquisitr was completely excluded from Techmeme, not even appearing as a link-in source on stories. Gabe may argue that this is untrue, and I only have my own observations from this week to go on; he may also reinclude The Inquisitr to prove this to be untrue, so it comes with that proviso.

My simple agenda is that I dislike Rivera’s statements that Techmeme is unbiased and is highly influential, when neither is true. My personal issues aside, this post will consider facts, with some commentary where required. I cannot stop some people saying that this is some sort of personal vendetta (I’d note that if it was, it was started by Rivera), but I can present facts and lets others draw conclusions from them.

Myth: Techmeme is Influential

The idea of Techmeme being influential comes from its use by some high end blogs and VCs. That some people of influence read Techmeme cannot be disputed, but extending that out to influential isn’t supported by numbers.

Here’s Techmeme’s traffic stats from a range of site tracking tools:

Quantcast: 7,188 visits per month/ site rank of 91,617
Compete: 291,621 people
comScore: no record of traffic (to small to measure)
Alexa: rank 119,812 with 1.2 pages per visitor

Compete is the odd one out (high use of the Compete toolbar or plugin perhaps), but even if we take a middle line, the influence is small. Techmeme doesn’t do a lot of page views. Consider that 1.2 pages a visitor on Alexa would also indicate search engine traffic as opposed to regular engagement; if it were influential more people would be refreshing Techmeme regularly because they are on the site checking for the latest headlines.

Publicly available statistics aren’t always brilliant, but a site that is said to be so highly influential should on these measures be ranked far higher than it is, by most objective measures of a websites worth. The numbers don’t support the myth.

Myth: Techmeme drives traffic (and how YHacker News beats it)

BusinessWeek called Rivera “the traffic driver” based on the myth of influence, but the numbers don’t stack up. I’m yet to talk to a person who can claim to have gained huge amounts of traffic from Techmeme, but that’s anecdotal of course and not based on facts. So lets look at some facts from this site.

The biggest amount of traffic ever delivered to The Inquisitr from Techmeme before we were excluded was 1,112 page views on a single post. In that time we had a reasonable list of headlines, some of them top of the page, some of them further down. The total amount of traffic from Techmeme during that time into the leading 10 posts (by traffic from Techmeme) is 5122 page views, or 512 page views per post. The distribution of numbers varies. There was one post (mentioned) with more than 1000 page views, three posts between 736-766 page views, and the remaining posts ranged from 158-400 pages views.

Sound like a big traffic driver? Digg and Reddit have peaked in 5 figures for this site, although Reddit does smaller numbers on average (but regularly low to mid 4 figures), but that’s probably not a fair comparison. What is a better comparison is the very niche YHacker News site.

On every publicly available measurement, YHacker News is smaller in traffic than Techmeme, and yet you wouldn’t be able to tell from the numbers they deliver

Our top ten posts by traffic delivered from YHacker News totalled 7073 page views. The top post came in at 2639 page views, more than double the highest figure from Techmeme. The second and third posts fell just short of 1000 page views (998 and 995) and the remaining posts ranged from 242 to 469.

So is Techmeme really a traffic driver compared to YHacker News? On the evidence we would suggest no. YHacker News may have a smaller readership, but their influence is extended through the engagement its readers have with content on the site, something Techmeme doesn’t match.

Other sites may have different numbers from Techmeme, some higher, some lower, but even taking that into account, a niche site with significantly less traffic statistically delivers more traffic than the “traffic driver” that is Techmeme. On the evidence at hand, the numbers don’t support the myth.

Myth: Techmeme is not biased

Rivera has long claimed that Techmeme is an unbiased tracker of leading tech news. I’ve already mentioned our improved traffic and link spread post Techmeme earlier in this post, so I won’t revisit our situation, but we can look at other sites for evidence of bias.

The concept around Crunchmeme, or that TechCrunch gets unfavorable treatment in Techmeme isn’t new, and the number of headlines TechCrunch gets on Techmeme (backed by the Techmeme Leaderboard) anecdotally supports the idea. The real question is that do numbers support the notion that there a bias towards TechCrunch; and likewise is it harder for other sites to get a headline on Techmeme.

The obvious comparison is Mashable, TechCrunch’s largest competitor, and a site (and team) hated by the crew at TechCrunch, people Rivera has always been very close to (the two times I’ve met Rivera were in Michael Arrington’s house). As of today, Mashable does not feature in the Top 100 blogs on the Techmeme Leaderboard, but this wasn’t always the case. Historically, at least according to TechCrunch’s Blogger Board, Mashable ranks at 33. So what happened to Mashable?

According to public measures of traffic, Mashable is competitive with TechCrunch on traffic. Quantcast places Mashable ahead on traffic, but Alexa, Compete and comScore has TechCrunch in the lead, but only by a small margin.

Mashable has had 9 headlines on Techmeme over September and October (at the time of writing) vs TechCrunch’s 245 headlines.

In terms of incoming links, Mashable ranks 14th on Technorati to TechCrunch’s 3rd. Technorati’s authority score which counts incoming links over the last 6 months ranks TechCrunch at just over double of Mashable’s score. From this we can establish that TechCrunch gets more links, but at a ratio of around 2.3:1 vs Mashable. The headline split for Techmeme is 27.2:1.

But does TechCrunch have an easier path to Techmeme than Mashable, even allowing for the link profiles?

We checked 20 random TechCrunch headlines from September and October (random as we could be, but I didn’t close my eyes and click). Of 20 tested headlines, 2 had no visible incoming links shown on Techmeme, 15 had 1 incoming link, and 3 had more than one link showing.

Here’s an example of a story on Techmeme today with no visible links. Rivera likes to claim that other links are considered but not shown, and that makes some sense, given according to Technorati, the only site linking to this post that isn’t a spam blog (as the time of writing) is The Inquisitr through our best of the web section on the front page

But how many links do Mashable stories need to hit the front page when they do? Of the 9 posts Mashable had on Techmeme in September and October, the average number of links shown was 3. No posts had no shown links, 2 has 1 link (including one post where The Inquisitr was the only site linking in visible), 1 headline had 2, 2 headlines had 3, 3 headlines had 4, and one had 5.

For Mashable at least, getting a headline, if and when they are able to, involved more sites running the story as shown on Techmeme.

It should be noted that not all shown links link to the headline stories, Techmeme groups stories based on context as well, and doesn’t necessarily give the headline to the first person who posts, or the site with the most incoming links. So Techmeme has to pick who gets the headline when multiple sites are writing about the same story, but not necessarily linking to each other.

Here’s the split again: TechCrunch 245 posts vs 9 from Mashable. That doesn’t allow for topics that both would have covered, but there is sufficient overlap on big stories to suggest that the overlap would be around 50%, so lets try that again:

Where there is an estimated 50% overlap of coverage, the split goes TechCrunch 123 vs Mashable 5 (both rounded up).

Now lets take TechCrunch’s treatment on Techmeme out of the consideration, and compare Mashable with another site featured on Techmeme regularly: Silicon Alley Insider (SAI). I’m not suggesting that SAI doesn’t deserve to be there, Henry Blogdet and his team are doing some great work and should be up there. But we can use the site in comparison to Mashable because it’s currently in third spot on the Techmeme Leaderboard (CNet news is 2nd, but it’s not strictly a blog, so it’s not as well compared).

At the time of writing, SAI has had 118 headlines on Techmeme for September/ October 2008 compared to Mashable’s 9. On links, SAI has a Technorati authority score of 4556 (it’s ranked 41st overall) and in traffic, the various services place SAI at one third to one half of Mashable’s traffic; Quantcast has the split SAI 650,000 to Mashable 1.4 million, and both are direct measures from each site (although Quantcast does under-report numbers a little bit in my experience.)

Even if we exclude the idea that Techmeme is biased towards TechCrunch, the stats prove that Techmeme is biased against Mashable, even if we allow for a wide ranging margin of error in the stats shown here.

Rivera’s line that Techmeme is not biased doesn’t stack up. He weighs the importance of sites, punishing sites and people he doesn’t like, while favoring those sites and people he does like.

Conclusion

It saddens me that Techmeme has come to this point. I’ve spent more hours than I care to mention on the site over the last 4 years, and it will always hold a small amount of affection in my memories. But enough is enough. This idea that Techmeme is the great influencer, the bringer of traffic, and an unbiased source of leading tech news isn’t supported by facts. The great Techmeme myth is a fairytale of spin; you don’t have to take my word for it, look at the numbers.

TechCrunch sued by Earthcomber, ethical questions

Duncan Riley — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:49:35 +0000

Earthcomber, a location focused applications provider has filed suit against TechCrunch, Interserve and Loopt over patent infringement.

The core of the complaint started with a charge against Loopt over similar services, and TechCrunch was a late addition to the suit. Michael Arrington is claiming that the charge is guilt only by association, as TechCrunch is nothing more than a “search filter” in Loopt. But Earthcomber argues otherwise, noting that the relationship goes beyond that (something not mentioned at all by Arrington) and that Loopt and TechCrunch offer a joint application called Loopt TC, and that TechCrunch’s involvement in offering that application, complete with their name on it, means that they are a party to the patent infringement taking place.

I’m not a lawyer, but certainly the divide between simply guilt by association, and co-branded service is an interesting difference in the stories, but whether that is enough for a successful lawsuit I couldn’t say. But the back story to this point gets more interesting again, because it turns out that TechCrunch publicly attacked Earthcomber despite their relationship with Loopt when the lawsuit was first filed, and prior to TechCrunch being named on it.

The LA Times notes that the post from Mark Hendrickson included calling the suit “a desperate attempt to get the company some attention,” and originally described the lawsuit as “rather absurd,” but that line was later removed. The post does disclose the relationship with Loopt, and actually notes that the relationship IS MORE than what Arrington is saying in the new post, using the words “co-branded community” to describe the relationship.

The big question then becomes one of ethics: is it ethical to write a hit post on a company suing a company you’re in a business relationship with, even with the disclosure.

I don’t believe it is, but with the following points.

Not once during my time at TechCrunch do I recall being asked to write a hit post (by hit post I mean takedown, hit as in the organized crime etc.). I’m not saying that this isn’t the case here, and I always had one advantage: I wasn’t there. I never had Michael yelling stuff at me during the day. Certainly I was forwarded stuff I should consider writing about, but I was never asked straight out to write that sort of post. It’s not inconceivable that Mark could have written that post without Michael’s prompting, and the disclosure was added by Michael after the fact to cover them. But then again, I’d be surprised if this was the sort of post Mark would have done without prompting, and even if it was, it is the sort of post he probably would have run by Michael anyway. Mark’s a great guy, so I do want to say upfront that I’m not pointing the finger at him. When he eventually escapes there, and if he pursues blogging as a career, I wouldn’t think twice about hiring him if I could afford to do so (of course at the moment, I’m not even close).

We were however always aware of who our friends were, and who our enemies were at TechCrunch. For me, that did take some time (again, because I wasn’t there), and early on I wrote attack posts on people Michael wished I hadn’t, and I recall him using the fact as evidence that TechCrunch doesn’t play sides on stories. That didn’t last though, because it was always made clear who the good guys were, and who the bad guys were. That it wasn’t written down as editorial policy is irrelevant, and if we got it wrong it was regularly corrected; and can I tell you there’s nothing more special in the world than waking up to find yourself being attacked for overly positive words in a post with your name on it, that you didn’t write.