John Furrier’s PodTech just announced that they had their first 2 million download month. If you don’t subscribe to John’s podcasts you should. It’s an extremely useful source of information on web 2.0 and other companies, and he’s had more than a few exclusive announcements.

Congratulations, John!

It pretty much says it all for me, too, after all of the hate mail/blogs/comments from people telling me what to write about and how to write it, on TechCrunch. Ethan Lipton: You Were Right.

Dave Winer likes the song too.

John Furrier’s timing is impeccable again - he just published the first ever podcast interview with Steve Forbes.

This goes out as the blogosphere is still exploding in anger over the Daniel Lyons article on blogs that is in the current print edition of the magazine. Shel Israel wrote an open letter to Forbes magazine yesterday that was beautifully written. In his post, Shel says:

I was embarrassed for both you and Forbes today, when I read your one-sided, fact-bashing diatribe. I would have expected this level of journalism to have come from other sources such as the New York Post or the online Guardian.

and

As far as the silliness of calling us a lynch mob, Daniel. My free advice to you is to be very grateful on a personal level that your charge is without merit.

John recorded the interview on Friday, just before the blog story broke. I would have loved to have heard Steve Forbe’s comments on the story but, alas, the timing was off by a matter of hours.

I used to write a weekly wrapup on TechCrunch. I’d bookmark interesting web 2.0 stuff during the week, and sit down on Sunday evening and write about all of it. You can see the old posts here. I’ve stopped doing it. I can now use this blog to write about interesting stuff as it happens instead of waiting until the weekend when no one really cares any more.

Plus, Richard MacManus always did a better job at it anyway. He just posted this week’s wrapup. Check it out, and subscribe to his blog if you use a reader and want to stay up to date on web 2.0 news.

The first item in his wrapup this week is the Microsoft announcement on Tuesday. I’ve heard all sorts of rumors as to what will be announced. Richard thinks it may center around hosted services, for instance. I was lucky enough to be invited, and I will be posting on it as soon as I can, hopefully even from the hotel. It starts at 10 am PST on Tuesday, Nov. 1.

Dave Winer posted a new Coffee Notes podcast. Bits of tagcamp coolness in there. Even more politics - Dave wonders when Scooter will start spilling the beans and moving this whole mess up the ladder at the White House. Near the end, Dave mentions the Microsoft press meeting on Tuesday. I’ll be there, can’t wait to hear the news.

Ken Yarmosh, a paid consultant to Blogniscient, has written an open letter criticizing me for writing such glowing reviews of Memeorandum (blogniscient is a competitor to memeorandum).

In particular, he didn’t like my post yesterday on TechCrunch comparing the Blogniscient and Memeorandum and he felt that Blogniscient deserved it’s own review. I left a comment, reprinted below.

I’d like to know people’s opinion on this issue.

Ken,

A few thoughts.

1. I apologize if I haven’t answered your emails. I’m a one man shop and I get hundreds of emails a day. I cannot read all of them. It’s something that I beat myself up over constantly because I feel that if someone takes the time to email me, I should take the time to read it and write back. I may hire someone to help out at TechCrunch, but given that it is a zero revenue site I don’t know when that will happen.

2. TechCrunch is not an objective site. It’s all about my opinions. I’ve never claimed otherwise.

3. I apologize if I did not give your client a stand alone review. To be fair, I don’t think it deserves a stand alone review and is interesting, at this time, only as part of the broader discussion of how memeorandum is changing the web. I wrote my opinion of the service, and gave what I believe is a quite favorable review. In my opinion, and I repeat, in my opinion, memeorandum is a far superior service.

4. I have an open house here in Atherton and I invite many people to stay. During the web 2.0 conference people were on the floors, on the couches, in the bedrooms. One of those people is a VC with a $30m net worth. I didn’t include him in my top VCs post. He’s pissed. He’ll get over it.

Gabe has stayed here, and he has grown to be a friend. This has developed after I’ve gotten to know memeorandum, and quite frankly one of the reasons I like hanging out with him is that he’s so damn smart. There is no nepotism in my posts on memeorandum.

I have no financial or other interest in memeorandum, nor have I been paid to write anything about memeorandum or any other company.

5. I think you should look in the mirror. You are a paid consultant to blogniscient and this wasn’t disclosed in your early posts, or in the comments you blanketed the blogospere with.

I am launching a company called edgeio in the near future. I’ve posted, once, on edgeio, and I fully disclosed that I am a founder. I also said I won’t be posting on it much, if at all, in the future.

6. If people like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer think Memeorandum is great, perhaps it is simply because it is.

7. I think you owe me an apology for this open letter, regarding your claims of a conflict of interest.

Paul Montgomery desecrated my favorite album from high school this morning. Admitedly, though, its pretty funny - my favorite picture is the one of Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum (left).

Paul has a startup launching soon called Tinfinger. Can’t wait to give my review on TechCrunch.

Here are Paul’s Lyrics to “Two Point Oh Ain’t Web Pollution”

Hey there all you media men
Throw away your fancy ties
And while you’re out there sittin’ on a hedge fund
So get off your 1.0 payout and come down here
‘Cause two point oh ain’t no riddle man
To me it makes good Google AdSense
Google AdSense! Ow! Oooh yeah!

Hundreds of podcasts are playing on my iPod
We got valuations coming up from the floor
We’re just browsing to the Flock that’s giving too much noise
Are you deaf, GEMAYA will buy us all

We’re just bloggin’ about the future
Forget about one point oh
Blodgett’ll always be with us
Meeker’s never gonna die, never gonna die

Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh ain’t gonna die
Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh it will be flipped

Yes it will, sh*t sh*t sh*t

I took a look inside your bedroom door
You looked so good tagging on de.licio.us
Well, I asked you if you wanted any rhythm and love
You said you wanna MySpace instead

We’re just bloggin’ about the future
Forget about one point oh
Beta’ll always be with us
AJAX’s never gonna die, never gonna die

Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh ain’t gonna die
Two point oh ain’t Web pollution
Two point oh is just made of people

Thanks Richard for the pointer.