Social news purists will no doubt shrilly protest against TechCrunch's marketing scheme, but the rest of us know this kind of "Digg Army" approach to voting up stories on Digg.com is both inevitable, commonplace, and clever enough — until Digg's moderators or its spam-detection algorithms catch up with you. The question isn't whether TechCrunch should do this — it's why your site hasn't, you lazy punters.

The big news, Biggs says, is that TechCrunch is giving CrunchGear a dedicated ad sales force and, for the first time, a budget. He's put some writers "on hiatus" until the site's salespeople ramp up, keeping a team of five writers, whom he's now paying on a flat monthly fee, instead of the previous scheme of paying by the post. He's not sure how my source got the impression that his pay was being cut. As for MobileCrunch, he says the site will continue, but he's trying to find the right writer for the topic. (A disclosure: Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, also runs Gizmodo, a competitor to CrunchGear. Biggs is a former Gizmodo editor.)