Earthcomber is suing TechCrunch, along with Loopt, for pretty dubious reasons. I’ll let Michael Arrington speak for himself, from his post:

I called Earthcomber President Jim Brady this morning to verify the lawsuit. At first he wouldn’t answer - all he did was try to explain how he’s been wronged by Loopt. When pressed he did confirm that the lawsuit was filed, but quickly added that he didn’t really mean to press it with us. He wants to go to court with Loopt, but is willing to quickly work something out with us to make this go away, he told me, hinting that he’d like to partner with us. He also said he’s been desperately trying to get me on the phone but hasn’t been able to, so he decided to sue us instead.

You know, this sounds like a really bad idea to me, and I certainly don’t think that taking legal actions against someone is a good way to connect. At least not if you’re looking for a partnership. And obviously that won’t happen with Earthcomber and TechCrunch either: read more

Giga Omni Media has secured another $4.5 million in funding, bringing the total to $5.3 million according to Michael Arrington, who disagrees with the decision to raise money at all. Om Malik writes:

We are going to use this new investment prudently, to enhance our technology platform and content offerings, add to our current portfolio of publications and expand our Events and Briefings businesses. We are in investing for the long-term — in ourselves.

This move shows that Giga Omni Media will continue to expand aggressively, and further acquisitions, following the ones of jkOnTheRun and The Apple Blog, is likely.

Arianna Huffington’s The Huffington Post is the new #1 spot on Technorati Top 100 blogs list, overtaking previous frontrunner Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch. I’m not sure if this really means anything, but TechCrunch have been controlling the Technorati Top 100 list for some time now. Other than that, here’s the top 10:

1. The Huffington Post
2. TechCrunch
3. Gizmodo
4. Engadget
5. Boing Boing
6. Lifehacker
7. Ars Technica
8. Official Google Blog
9. Daily Kos
10. TravelPod

Do you care about the Technorati Top 100 list at all?

The New York Times, in an article penned by Brad Stone, takes an in-depth look at the rivalry between the DEMO Conference and the new upstart TechCrunch50 conference:

Demo, a 17-year-old conference franchise owned by the technology publisher IDG, has served as the springboard for hit products like the Palm Pilot and the TiVo digital video recorder. In San Diego during the second week of September, 70 start-ups will pay $18,500 each to make a six-minute presentation to a crowd of investors, journalists and others.

To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model amounts to “payola.”

read more

Michael Arrington calls for a Fake Follow feature on Twitter, and similar on FriendFeed for that matter, so that he can stroke people’s egos. What? I actually makes sense:

[...] there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.

I’ve had some of those myself, and I think Arrington i pretty spot on with the need for a less friendly follow on Twitter. It just becomes too much to handle, both for yourself and, I suspect, for Twitter when you’ve got 300+ followers. Or wherever, it probably depends on who you follow too. The story notes that Twitter “might” adopt something like this, and FriendFeed’s got features coming out to cope with it.

This is interesting. TechCrunch have started a project where they want to build an open-source based web tablet, running Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux distribution, with just a touch screen interface. Add a power button, and a $200 price tag, and you’ve got the essentials of this interesting project.

There’s great interest in this, truly, because the first post on TechCrunch is at 593 comments, and TechCrunchIT, another site in Michael Arrington’s network, have two posts for discussions, the first which is now closed, and a new one to keep the discussion going on.

I’m hoping they’ll pull this one together. A simple web tablet for $200 would be sweet indeed.