TechCrunch has announced that they’ve passed the 10,000 post mark, which is impressive to say the least. The tech blog launched in June 2005 and has become a phenomenon since then, loved, hated, ignored, and important to the web 2.0 startup industry, if you can call it that.
They’re saying that the Death to the Embargo post was the 10,000th one, and naturally the controversy hit TechMeme, with lots of follow-ups. ReadWriteWeb takes another stance, saying they’ll respect embargoes, which Arrington & Co. obviously won’t anymore. Personally, I think embargoes are a good thing when used right. Problem is, usually it is just a press release you can’t write about until a few days time, and that’s just nonsense. It is a whole different matter if you’ve got early access or similar. An interesting discussion to say the least, one we’ll pass for now.
Anyway, congratulations to TechCrunch on writing a whole lotta posts!
I’ve seen some of these services before, but it wasn’t until I read Michael Arringtons harsh treatment of Sam Sethi’s new venture, called Twitblogs. You might remember the Arrington-Sethi debacle back in 2007, the latter having been the editor of TechCrunch UK, and then crashed Blognation without paying its writers and employees. There’s a lot of bad blood there, and I’m not surprised to see the way Arrington handled Sethi’s latest offering.
That being said, I visited the site, and also checked in on its competitors. Or rather, the ones that Sethi ripped off, if TwitWall founder Michael E. Carluen (if it really is he) is to be believed. TwitWall is one of the competitors to Twitblogs, another one mentioned is Twitlonger, and I think I’ve seen even more of these. read more
Techmeme is adding a human touch to its news aggregator, by appointing Megan McCarthy as editor. She’ll rearrange and moderate the news on Techmeme, to keep them more up to date and avoid old and outdated one. She’ll also handle all the pissed off journos who thinks they are bypassed, something that might be a daily issue for her if you read between the lines in the VentureBeat post. I don’t know about that, but it’s not the most grateful position to have, when some cranky tech blogger feel passed over for the 20th time…
Humans have always edited Techmeme of course, just implicitly. For instance, when a blogger links to a story, the headline might move higher on Techmeme. What’s different now is that an additional human editor will carry out changes explicitly to directly improve the mix of headlines on Techmeme. Though the implicit edits conveyed via algorithm outnumber the explicit edits perhaps by 1000 to 1 or more, the impact of the human editor is nonetheless pronounced.
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
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:
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.”
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.
TechCrunch has announced that they’ve passed the 10,000 post mark, which is impressive to say the least. The tech blog launched in June 2005 and has become a phenomenon since then, loved, hated, ignored, and important to the web 2.0 startup industry, if you can call it that.
I’ve seen some of these services before, but it wasn’t until I read Michael Arringtons harsh treatment of Sam Sethi’s new venture, called 
