Michael Arrington + Orli Yakuel = link love?

Techcrunch's Michael Arrington is no stranger to hatesites, and he even makes a point of trading a T-shirt for the haters who launch them. For example, he directs us to the imaginatively named Michael Arrington Sucks, which in turn points back to the industriously brewing tempest in a teapot regarding the relationships, commercial and otherwise, between Arrington and dishy Israeli entrepreblogger Orli Yakuel. As usual, the main drama is in the comments. In a large, ungainly nutshell, Yakuel's nom du Digg, webtech, has a preponderance for pushing Techcrunch and Crunchgear stories. Her account was actually once deleted by Digg for some kind of malfeasance, though Arrington supposedly helped convince Digg to reinstate her. Yakuel's Flickr stream gushes over Techcrunch and Arrington with the starstruck enthusiasm of Tiger Beat. Yakuel is also the proprietor of Go2web20.net, "The Complete Web 2.0 Directory" — it's a sort of Million Dollar Homepage of Web 2.0 hype. Go2web20.net is sponsored by Techcrunch, and Arrington and other Crunchies have treated the site favorably in the past.

But where is the sex? The most damning of the admittedly tepid accusations claim that Yakuel is Arrington's "ex-girlfriend," which is a geekily demure way of saying they might have slept together or something, and thus Arrington is trading traffic for "favors." They're certainly pals, though Arrington denies they're any more than that. Despite a few grumblings that Arrington must henceforth accompany future mentions of Go2web20.net with the magical balm of disclosure, this is probably a simple, relatively boring case of friends who like each other's stuff (or "stuff"). If they're really not involved in a secretive, torrid affair of trading sexual favors for favorable links, calls for Arrington to fully explain his relationship to Yakuel will likely fall on deaf ears. As occasional Techcrunch contributor Nik Cubrilovic comments incredulously, "Do you really expect Mike to discuss who he is and is not fucking?" (No, but I wish he would.) Or as commenter "other" says, "omg Mike trades money for sex? wait... money for money? oh... I'm less interested in the scandal now..."

[Photo: michakaufman]

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