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.

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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: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

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.

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)