We suppose this whole episode lends credence to Arrington's irritating "blogging will kill you" argument. Or maybe not. Regardless, even though Rwanda is nowhere near as hostile as SXSW discussion panels, be safe out there Sarah—Even our gay British overlord thinks you're hot.

via TechCrunch

Yesterday's Gillmor Gang topic: the Palm Pre. Things started out nice enough when LaPorte - who owns and operates netcast network TWiT.tv, on which the show is featured - was discussing how much he enjoyed his new toy. Arrington, sounding a little bitter about not having one, asks LaPorte whether or not he got his for free. LaPorte notes that yeah, he did, but that he wasn't the only one! Arrington notes it to be on the record, and that's when LaPorte really gets pissed, especially over the implication that the fact that he got the thing for free would ever influence his review over a highly coveted tech product! Arrington chuckles back: "What're you gonna do about it?" That's when LaPorte lets loose, and promptly shuts the show down:

Glorious, no? The program, as you can tell, actually did get shut down. Arrington later went on TechCrunch to issue an apology to LaPorte, explaining that he didn't at all intend to provoke him, and that he was just joshin' him:

I've had a lot of interactions with [LaPorte] and they've always been positive. Or at least I thought so. I wasn't watching the video live during the show and I really thought Leo was joking until the very end (as did Steve Gillmor and Loren Feldman, who were chuckling in the video). My "what are you going to do about it" comment doesn't sound so great in hindsight. But I really did just think he was joking around.

It gets better, though: Arrington noted at the end of his apology post on TechCrunch that comments were going to be moderated. LaPorte kindly comments on Arrington's post with a mutual apology for the snapping:

Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you.

There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I'm embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace.

But it ain't over, yet, because the commenters are pissed about being moderated by Arrington! Arrington, who has received numerous death threats before over his site, responds thusly:

Many comments are complaining about comment moderation. This isn't about free speech. It's about dozens of death threats and hundreds of others saying pretty horrible things about one of of us. You may think that your comment needs to get heard and that calling for someone to die shouldn't be taken seriously. But multiply that by hundreds and maybe you'll get a sense of this. I was rude. I made the problem worse by saying things because I thought he was play-mad. and then i apologized. i may be a lot of things but i don't think i deserve to die over this. please. stop. i can't deal with the death threats after what happened last year and then this year in europe. leo won. you guys won. i surrender. just stop. please. stop.

Quite simply, Arrington was being "cute," and this thing just blew up in their faces. Really, the problem is that these guys never played a game of two-hand-touch in their lives. No harm, no foul!

And who the hell is making death threats to Michael Arrington over this? Jesus. Arrington then notes in the comments that this "ruined [his] entire weekend. for fuck's sake." And why wouldn't it?

Lesson learned: gadget nerds are terrifying! I'm going back to writing about Sesame Street and hipsters. Goodbye. Freaks.

N.B. One commenter on TechCrunch noted that Arrington has been "Keyboard Catted." Which made me laugh very loudly. Gadget nerds: terrifying. But hysterical:

First the voluble tech blogger, an opinionated chronicler of the obscurest of Web startups, announced BusinessWeek online columnist Sarah Lacy as a substitute writer. Then he said he had to file two more interviews from Davos, the power conference of the world's economic hyperelite. Then he announced another substitute.

This protracted exit makes one wonder: Is Arrington's biggest fear that the Web might not actually miss him? It's a double-edged sword: TechCrunch's overdependence on one outsized personality was a factor in AOL dropping acquisition talks. If he can prove that TechCrunch can carry on without him, then he might be able to unload it on some larger buyer — though surely at a steep discount to the $100 million price he's bandied about. But if he shows that an Arrington-free TechCrunch is a going concern, any acquirer will surely want to fire the erratic founder as soon as the ink dries on the deal, rather than deal with his ongoing emotional outbursts. That would deprive him of the public stature he claims to hate, but so clearly craves. It's a dilemma which is surely the most plausible explanation for Arrington's reluctant exit.

Yesterday, someone spat on Arrington at a conference in Munich. For the self-crowned king of startups — which is worth a Twitter follower list that numbers in the thousands and a bobblehead doll made in your likeness — that was an unforgivable act of lèse-majesté. So, he wants to abdicate. "In the past I've been grabbed, pulled, shoved and otherwise abused at events," he writes, "but never spat on. I think this is where I'm going to draw a line."

Arrington has encouraged a fantasy among his followers: Get written up in TechCrunch, and your startup will get funding and you will become rich. Arrington himself rather expected the same would happen to him — that one of his VC buddies would plow millions into TechCrunch, or one of the dealmakers he lionized would snap up TechCrunch for a large media company. His hoped-for exit never happened — and likely never will, now that the Web 2.0 bubble which TechCrunch was founded to chronicle has evaporated.

Instead, he's stuck with a dream deferred, and a nightmare realized. Over the summer, Arrington attracted a mentally unbalanced stalker who made violent threats, and he went into hiding at his parents' home in Washington state. He ended up paying $2,000 a day for private security on TechCrunch's office, which is also his home. Is there a better example of the costs of being famous, and how few benefits attach?

The only answer is to go into hiding, which Arrington is doing. But only after he attends the World Economic Forum in Davos.

(Photo by meattle)

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who believes Europeans are too lazy to found startups, experienced drooling contempt at the DLD conference in Munich.

Vaguely employed videoblogger Amanda Congdon concluded that L.A. is full of racists.

Macworld editor Kelly Turner froze in San Francisco.

BusinessWeek's Amy Feldman thought about the children.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis criticized the media.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Has a real media job. Lazar has already achieved something beyond the reach of most fameballs: Steady employment with a large, traditional media business. She hosts Open House LA and First Look LA on KNBC, the Los Angeles-based NBC station. (She's also a host on the Reelz channel, whatever that is.)

Has lived in LA since 2004. Lazar is something of a personality in the self-proclaimed L.A. tech/blogging scene. (In this photo, she attempts to interview Perez Hilton.)

Dov Charney's stepsister. Lazar, described as a "hot peppy Jewish girl from Montreal" by one YouTube user, went to the same Canadian school as Charney, now the CEO of American Apparel, but 14 years apart. When she interviewed her scandal-plagued stepbrother last August, she did not mention his history of sexual-harassment lawsuits, or, in fact, any relationship to Charney at all. That's family loyalty for you! Also not disclosed in the video: Her habit of picking up free clothes from American Apparel. (TV stars get tons of free clothing from airtime-hungry designers, but not usually from their stepbrother's firm.)

Went to Emerson College. Bachelor's degree in TV/video.

Participated in the 2005 Ujena Bikini Jam.

Flirted with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Lazar showed up at a TechCrunch party last July. The doughy blogger accosted her and asked her why she was there. That encounter begat a working relationship where she tried making a few video clips for him. The talks never went anywhere, as she's on contract with NBC through February.

Began dating Rose near the end of November. No professional interest here: "Rose just wants to bang hot chicks off his Twitter list," says one informant who has observed their relationship closely. He does have a large online following, thanks to the popularity of Digg, his news-discussion site, and Diggnation, a companion online-video series where he drinks and discusses Digg headlines on camera. Could Lazar be hoping to leverage Rose's crowd?

Drew controversy at the Sundance Festival. Arrington — perhaps miffed that his play for Lazar went nowhere? — complained that Lazar had cheated to win 24 Hours at Sundance, a competition organized by Rose and Kutcher — and also claimed she'd been bragging about dating one of the organizers. Assuming Demi Moore has nothing to worry about, that would be Rose.

Went to Barack Obama's inauguration with Julia Allison. Allison, the Time Out dating columnist who briefly pursued Rose and remained obsessed for months afterward, claims she's over him. Curious, then, that she cozied up to Lazar in Washington, D.C., offering Lazar her spare ticket to the inaugural. Aubrey Sabala, a Digg marketing manager, may have helped make the introduction hobnobbed with the two in D.C. That's especially curious because I've noticed how extraordinarly protective Digg employees have become about their founder's love life lately. Introducing his girlfriend to the famously indiscreet Allison hardly seems like the way to further that goal. Then again, perhaps that's why Sabala dived between them in the last photo below. Update: Allison, in an expletive-laced IM conversation, informed me that Meghan Asha, her Silicon Valley heiress sidekick, met Lazar at Sundance and subsequently introduced the two.

How serious are they? This is Rose we're talking about, who's not known for his long-term relationships. And the two live and work in different cities. Sean Percival, an L.A. tech personality, says it's over already.

(Photos via Twitpic, Nonsociety, TheChimp.net, LAist, and AnchorBabes)

Arrington is the founder and editor of TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley tech blog which rose to the faintest level of prominence on the national stage by chronicling "Web 2.0," a phenomenon which more or less disappeared two years ago and which no one now confesses to involvement in without blushing embarrassment.

The man himself is tall, large, and blustery, given to fits of rage and depression, at once emotionally fragile and viciously vituperative. He does have keen insights on the inner workings of the tech industry. Frustratingly for him, the audience for those is small — and he would like to be running a much larger enterprise. But the credit crisis has popped Silicon Valley's microbubble, and with it, Arrington's dreams of buying up his competitors and then cashing out by selling the mess to investors.

Which sets the stage for Arrington, bitter and frustrated, to launch an attack on a convenient, hapless, and utterly deserving target: the public relations business. And somehow he's managing to make the flacks look sympathetic.

Frustrated by the practice of timed "embargoes," which limit the release of obscure news no one cares about to an arbitrary time convenient to nobody, Arrington has declared not that he will stop agreeing to embargoes, but that he will now agree to embargoes and then break his word. He's also unloaded on one particularly bad flack, Lois Whitman-Hess.

Meanwhile, he won't explain his curiously soft coverage of MySpace and curiously close relationship with MySpace's PR chief, Dani Dudeck.

What makes this all hilarious is that Arrington is really angry because he views public relations firms as his competition. He wants to be the gatekeeper and kingmaker for all the Valley's startups, controlling the public rollout of all of their most obscure milestones. The grandiosity of his territorial behavior, over such small turf, is tragicomic — like a dog pissing on every side of a tree, just to make sure we know it's his.

I'd say the technology industry doesn't need Arrington — but we do. Because now more than ever, we could all use a good laugh.

• Steve Jobs, ailing Apple CEO
• Kara Swisher, obnoxious AllThingsD blogger
• Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO
• Michael Arrington, TechCrunch editor
• Jerry Yang, Yahoo's undead CEO

How to wear it: Biz-dev blue dress shirt and pleated pants.

How to scare them: Whenever someone starts talking to you, find someone more important in the room and walk away. If anyone complains, take a mental note of where they work and swear never to write about them again, unless they offer you a stake in the company.

Next: Jerry Yang, Yahoo's undead CEO

[random trolling, often with a wish that we'd die or are unethical in some way] - We get lots of these, and delete as many of them as we can. But first we check the IP address against previous comments left on the site. About once a month we see a really nasty anonymous comment that’s left by an IP address that had always been used by a single named commenter before that. Most of the time we had just posted a critical review of the person’s company right before the comment was left.

We don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great.

If you are going to say something nasty, use your real name or learn about the magic of proxy servers

Why, Google did, according to Davos party correspondent Meghan Asha, the sometimes girlfriend of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who got her in. Google's affair included Norman Jay, a British house-music DJ. There you have it: Larry and Sergey are at fault for distracting the world's best and brightest from preventing the meltdown we now face. If Schwab is serious about keeping thing's serious at the next WEF, we recommend disinviting Page and Brin. And Arrington and Asha.

He's made Web 2.0 as much as Web 2.0 made him. Now, Arrington needs to cut his name loose before he becomes just another has-been journalist with a trade magazine. There's only one way to do that: Quit TechCrunch. Back away slowly. Keep coming into work now and then — preferably to a real office, rather than commuting from his bedroom to his living room, as he still does today. Post some of the biggest scoops. Talk up the next conference, party, or other cobranded event with Calacanis and Om.

I don't do predictions. I'm always wrong. But Mike, this is true: I used to get tips all the time that "Michael Arrington is doing some vaguely dishonest thing. I know, because I know someone. Run with it, Valleywag! Keep digging! Follow the money!" Today, Friday October 24, 2008, with everyone freaking out over money, with tech employees looking for the truth behind the phony all-Is-well messages coming from their leaders, Valleywag gets more tips than ever. I've noticed one undeniable trend: The number of rumors about TechCrunch I get has peaked.

It's over. Michael Arrington may end up on Charlie Rose again. Michael Arrington may get called "kingmaker" again. Michael Arrington, kingmaker! But TechCrunch? Mike, that's so Web 2.0. (Photo by Joi Ito)

Stories. Companies now submit canned layoff rumors to TechCrunch, Valleywag and other sites. They hope to control the story, the way W's pimple-faced speechwriters leaked Bush's "Axis of Evil" text to their moles at the big newspapers. Look at the Source column on TechCrunch's list. Source: TechCrunch. Source: TechCrunch. Source: TechCrunch. Do you think Iron Mike Arrington is hiding behind the potted plants in your office? I hope he makes good on that threat to buy Fucked Company, so he can report Web 2.0 both coming and going.

Those online accusations claimed that Choi - who once won a government medal for her saving habit and whose name, Jin Sil, means "truth" - was a loan shark. They claimed that an actor named Ahn Jae Hwan, who gassed himself in his car last month, was driven to suicide because Choi pressed him relentlessly to repay a $2 million debt.

Choi's death followed a string of high-profile suicides attributed to cyberspace harassment. Two young female celebrities, one a singer and the other an actress, killed themselves last year after insulting comments about their alleged plastic surgery flooded the Web.

Which, ugh, is just awful. Of course critics of the Korean government, which is seeking to regulate the internet to prevent future attacks, say that the online bile isn't the root of the problem. Which is probably true in a reductionist "guns don't kill people, people kill people" kind of way. But in the actual world, the role of the internet in flesh-and-blood happenings is so vague and inhabits such a depressingly gray area of causality that maybe, I don't know, the internet is partly to blame—if by the sole virtue that we can't prove that it isn't to blame. Either way, I don't think we've quite evolved to weather personal attacks like this. The technology is moving a lot faster than, well, our souls are.

Much has been made, over and over again, about the troubling viciousness of this modern web that we've woven, so it's hard to say anything new. Hell, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has been expecting a Valleywag-related suicide for months now. But it still, every time something like this happens, makes us feel nauseous. That such a uniting thing—a free, open agora of ideas on its best days—can also be a conduit for what reduces down to sadistic cannibalism. Of, you know, the "e" varietal.

(Or maybe this is just me trying to personally exercise some maudlin guilt over what I do, on this day when we celebrate what Columbus did which was, you know, to murder thousands of Native Americans. I went to Salem, MA this weekend and it was so weird to see fried dough stands and bouncy castles and all manner of other silliness that essentially exists because about 300 years ago, some 20 innocent women were murdered by an angry mob. America! And, um, Korea!)

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch worries Mail Goggles is a hoax — fair enough, since Google developer Jon Perlow didn't explain how to find it unless you already know where it is. Typical engineer. To test-drive Mail Goggles, login to a Gmail account. Click Settings in the upper right corner, then click Labs at the far right. Mail Googles is halfway down the Labs page in alphabetical order. That alone should serve as a sobriety test. (Photoillustration by Digital Inspiration)

On MySpace's Data Availability, a feature which lets MySpace users link their profiles to other services like Twitter, versus Google's similar Friend Connect, he wrote:

MySpace is taking a much more interesting approach than Google.

In an early post about MySpace Music, Arrington gushed:

Music almost certainly plays a part of MySpace’s continued dominance of Facebook.

About MySpace friend-in-chief Tom Anderson's hacking back in the 1980s, Arrington dutifully wrote:

Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson just rose significantly.

A week before MySpace Music launched, Arrington quit playing games and just posted free ads for the service. None of that approached the review Arrington gave MySpace Music the morning it launched.

MySpace has done something incredible at a big picture level: they’ve created both a compelling music experience for users as well as a realistic, long term business model for labels and artists in a world where recorded music moves towards free. Depth of catalog and usability is far beyond what other free streaming services like Last.fm and iMeem currently offer. And when it comes to listening to music, the pop out player, pictured above, is excellent. It’s a great resource for users, and it’s likely to become the center of the revenue ecosystem for artists, particularly unsigned artists starting to make a name for themselves. Indie labels are in a great position, too. A lot of positive press is rolling in around this launch, and it’s much deserved.

We're told Dudeck leaked Arrington not only the MySpace Music screenshots, but also tipped him to a story about MySpace friend-in-chief Tom Anderson's brush with the FBI as a hacker in the 1980s. The article served to burnish Anderson's rather questionable geek credentials.

MySpace has helped Arrington's business in other ways besides feeding him stories. The News Corp.-owned social network was a major sponsor of the recent TechCrunch50 conference.

Arrington has no issue bragging privately about his relationship with Dudeck. And Dudeck, our source says, has "no issues to sleeping with key influencers." Before Arrington, we hear, the rumor was Dudeck dated MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe.

But don't believe us — let's go to the tape. Check out this clip of DeWolfe and Dudeck together at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, caught by Kara Swisher for AllThingsD. The way Dudeck leans in to DeWolfe to stay warm tells you more than any of our anonymous sources.

Kara's quippy response — "You don't have to love me" — reminds me of an anecdote my boss once related about Dudeck. The flirtatious MySpace flack accosted him at a conference last year and said, "We really need to work on our relationship." Sorry, Dani — Owen doesn't swing that way.

Yammer is a business-friendly copy of Twitter. It's an offshoot of Geni, a Web-based genealogy site started by former PayPal COO David Sacks, which raised $100 million in venture capital last year. TechCrunch50's prize panel, composed of Arrington and a few TechCrunch insiders (shown here, in a spy photo taken at the event), passed over more promising startups like FitBit, the maker of a wellness-monitoring gadget.

Quality aside, a sense of fairness might have led Arrington to give Yammer the skip: Neither Sacks nor Geni needed the $50,000 prize. Arrington's crush on Geni has been obvious since before its launch. (Most recently, he claimed Geni had close to a million visitors a month in August; according to a link to Compete.com Arrington himself included in his writeup, it's actually 400,000, a fraction of the audience enjoyed by established genealogy sites like Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.)

The problem with events like this is no one is unconflicted. But Sacks is in particularly deep: His former boss at PayPal, Peter Thiel, now runs VC firm Founders Fund, one of TechCrunch50's sponsors. Arrington has long been rumored to favor startups backed by the VCs who sponsor his event. He brags that he doesn't charge startups directly to appear on stage. But he seems to like to have them in his pocket, one way or another.

Conference

• Connectivity still an issue. Wifi out on Monday and the major celebs showed up to kowtow to King Arrington and Jason
• There is a secret mutiny going on with startups in the pay-to-play Demo Pit. They gave out poker chips to ticket holders to vote for their favorite startups, there 3 colors one for each day to decide. A single company, through the use of hot and semi naked booth girls has managed to monopolize Day 1's chips (80). The winner of the chips would get a review and extra publicity. So to counter the startup — which does something stupid — there are now alliances going on where other startups are grouping together and sharing their chips so that one company doesn't win. So far about 20 companies are in this coup.

Dinner

• Showed up for Nicole Jordan's dinner party at Lulu's. The bill was like $3k and I had to pay like $100 when I thought the meal was free.
• Calley Nye showed up, brought by Larry Chiang, but very quickly cozied up to Barney Pell of Powerset. They were hugging and cuddling and the guy had his hand on her thigh/knee the entire time.

Party

• Held at club Temple, they intermixed the TC50 crowd with the young kids that just randomly showed up. Music was loud and obnoxious and the crowd was a weird mix of uncomfortable geeks and drunk kids.
• snuck into VIP floor with Mark Cuban and entourage, bought him a beer
• Met [former FuckedCompany blogger] Pud and spoke to him about startups and AdBrite. he's finally very happy with with the way it's working right now.
• Jason calacanis showed up and he was pretty drunk most of the time.

After party

• At the W Hotel bar/lobby with Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Frank Gruber.
• Mark had a gaggle of blondes surrounding him. Most look 18. He kissed and rubbed quite a few them right next to me as I tried to get drinks. One was very upset that Mark wasn't giving her enough attention.
• Jason Calacanis is blizted enough to be stumbling everywhere
• Met a drunk girl that work for Geni/Yammer. She's apparently David Sak's BFF, some major assistant to the producer of Rush Hour or something. Got recruited from LA to handle "book-keeping and HR." says she's under NDA but eventually figured out that she has stock and they're working out a way to sell Yammer, a side project, by the next month.
• Calley showed towards the end of the night and approached Jason Calacanis while his wife was standing next to him but then Mark Cuban.
• As the party ended she's managed to convince him to let her hold his hand while he's hugging and kissing the other blondes.
• When we got kicked she managed to get herself into the front seat of Mark's surburban along with his entourage and left.
• Jason left in a limo at 2:30am with a very disgruntled wife and most likely not able to wake up for TC50 Day 3

An ode to the military superiority of these United States can only exacerbate tensions with cheap creditor and chip fabricator China and cause the relatively cosmopolitan diplomats in Europe and the Middle East to shake their heads and hard currency in consternation. We hear, second hand, that it was all Calacanis's idea, but Arrington is as much to blame all the same.

You can guess how immigrant entrepreneurs must have felt when they clutched their H-1B visas tightly to their breast — not to mention the service staff at the venue working for subcontractor wages that may or may not be on the books. Please, somebody definitively reveal this as a prank in the comments, because we're saddened and perplexed. (Photo by Frank Gruber)

If Arrington was, as his flack claims, considered and discarded from the main list, why didn't he show up on Vanity Fair's "Next Establishment," a collection of up-and-coming also-rans? Startup types like Ali and Hadi Partovi, the cofounders of music widget iLike, appeared there, though they're pretty much unknown outside the Valley. In this beauty contest, Arrington didn't even get the consolation prize. (Photo by Maria Avila/San Jose Mercury News)

Arrington himself describes Teare as someone "who formerly cofounded Edgeio with me," leaving out Teare's relationship with TechCrunch. As we understand it, Arrington and Teare swapped 10 percent stakes in their companies. Since Edgeio, an online classifieds startup, went under, we suppose that makes Teare the better dealmaker of the two. He's also more brutally honest. On his LinkedIn profile, Teare says of himself: "I am Mike Arrington's business partner in TechCrunch. I'm the one who advised him not to do it. :-)"

No such dilemma for cam queen Shira Lazar, a Los Angeles TV personality and Seesmic comment diva who's been shamelessly flirting with Arrington in public, online, for months. Lazar has landed in San Francisco for the TechCrunch show. Here's a video showing her having to deal with Michael Arrington and preparing for the big TechCrunchOrgy. You can stop watching after she mockingly tells Arrington how great he is, unless you're really into watching Lazar pick out her wardrobe.

The crowd was small, our spy reports — "about 20-30 people, mostly TechCrunch50 finalists." SearchMe.com was one of the finalists — "some woman even Twittered that they got in." Arrington drives a gray Porsche, and "left with a ladyfriend, didn't get to see who." (Anyone know who he's dating? Do tell!) On to the pictures!

Arrington, even as host, never could seem to crack a smile:

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde watches from the sidelines:

Arrington and Del Conte catch up:

For contrast, Web editors at Wired.com abandoned decks a year ago, replacing them with a mix of standalone headlines and excerpted blog posts.

An explanation at TechCrunch says a main goal was to "reduce load times" for the home page. More effective than reducing the amount of story text, TechCrunch's home page clutter of ads and widgets has been trimmed by about 20 percent, compared to old screenshots.

I'm sure clever commenters are already concocting their Valleywag-are-hypocrites posts, but here's what you don't know: We fight over stuff like this all the time. I'm a fan of the all-on-one-page format, for easy sneak-reading at work. Certain sweater-clad people here beg to differ.

"This was not going to be your mommy's website ... I wanted it to feel like a fashion and beauty magazine but with tremendous depth," Notkin told the Post blog. For "depth," read "Twitter," which Notkin credits with leveraging her brand or whatever nonsense phrase we're using today to excuse egolinking.

SavvyAuntie was among the most oft-Twittered words on its launch day — "her marketing is genius," said TechCrunch's snackiest flack, Calley Nye, before her own post got pulled, for, we guessed, overdoing the PR-speak. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's unpublishing of Nye's post, not the brilliance of SavvyAuntie's business plan, was likely what launched it into Twitter microfame. But Notkin is a genius for spinning the snafu as an event that promoted her "visibility." Someone else's baby, someone else's blunder — it's all fodder for Notkin's marketing event. That's really savvy.

(Photo by Kelly Sue)

What I’ve seen from Mike Arrington has just been classless,” he said. “I don’t understand what business objective he has other than to get notoriety.”

Arrington, for his part, admitted to enjoying a good wallow in the mud. [NYT] (Photo by Pete Jelliffe)

PR as a profession is broken. Most PR folks don’t read blogs and certainly don’t understand them. All they see is a Google alert with their clients name. For me PR is the last refuge when I’m attacking a story. What do you do if you’re a startup looking for help in getting the word out about your company? First off, don’t hire PR help. Start your own blog. And in your leisure time participate in the fascinating conversations occurring on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Great, except for one thing: Can anyone name a startup founder with leisure time?

(Photo by Jay Meattle)