The Techcrunch founder isn't much like his predecessor, personally. Arrington is touchy, even insecure, his friends say, which often comes out as hostility. When I ran into him, for the first time, recently, he said: I used to like you guys, until you made me want to kill myself. He's even blamed blog coverage for crimping his dating life. Tony Perkins, by contrast, never seemed all there. Both awkward, but in very different ways.

But Techcrunch occupies the same position in the Valley ecosystem that Red Herring once did.

Nobody I knew ever read the Herring cover-to-cover, because the writing was often painful, but everybody knew if a startup had secured a mention. And a mention was often all it took for a venture to qualify as hot, and secure funding. Herring events, presided over by Perkins and a cold Amazon called Pam Alexander, were over-subscribed, regardless of the content of the panels. And it was an open secret that Tony Perkins had equity interests in startups that Red Herring covered.

Tony Perkins is still around, with Always On Network. Red Herring, bought by Dasar, still exists as a website. But both have been dwarfed, in little more than a year, by Arrington's Techcrunch. The site gets first sight of most new web applications. Its events are profitable, and over-subscribed. And, testament to its success, Techcrunch is now a magnet for the resentment that the Herring once attracted.

It's natural for startup founders to assume that their fabulous new idea was ignored by Techcrunch, or reviewed without enthusiasm, because Arrington's been bribed. Or because he's sleeping with one publicist, or another. And probably inevitable that competitors, such as Jason Calacanis, cause mischief by calling conflict of interest. Or, more subtly, raising a question, or focusing on the appearance of impropriety.

Now that Techcrunch is holding large and overbooked events — the first in New York is at Bed, this Thursday — Arrington will find people ever more deferential to him in person, and ever more critical behind his back. For an example of that, wait for the next post, an anonymous note from an AOL staffer who didn't make the cut for this week's party.

I must have heard a half-dozen times that Arrington will crash and burn, but I'm not so sure. For a start, he seems less complacent than Tony Perkins ever did. He's operating in a much more competitive environment, in which sites such as Gigaom could easily take his place if he slips. And he's established a healthy precedent by disclosing his equity interests in companies such as Edgeio and Dogster.

The biggest risk to Arrington is not scandal, or even seething resentment. It's that he's so closely associated with Web 2.0, and all the little web application startups, which will die as soon as it's clear how few are picked up by Google or its competitors. And there's a lesson for Arrington in the story of Red Herring: let the boom go to your head, and the bust will kill you.

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