Is this the future? The TechCrunch50 Aggregator feeds us stories from the blogosphere and the social web that are tagged “techcrunch50″ or “tc50″, which is really cool. Sure, it is mostly tweets up front, but you can sort it. Perhaps this is the future, a mashed up feed of specific events. Sean Percival built the service, and naturally it hit TechCrunch as well.

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.”

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