On a recent Gillmor Gang, at around minute 21:30, Jason Calacanis innocently says something like “I heard you could buy a review at TechCrunch”. A discussion begins about conflicts of interest, at one point Jason says “just the appearance of impropriety is impropriety.” Or, in other words, when it comes to your reputation, an accusation is all it takes to ruin it, regardless of its veracity or lack thereof.

I find it incredible that Jason makes the accusation that I take money for reviews, couched ridiculously as “something he heard”, and then makes a blanket statement to the effect that the simple fact that the accusation is made makes it effectively true, in the journalism business. As an influencer I think it was inappropriate for him to make that statement. Beyond that, the fact that he is a competitor makes it even more outrageous.

Jason has a history of these sort of theatrics with Nick Denton, and so I’m not assuming he’s set on crushing TechCrunch. Rather, I think this is just Jason’s style to make these statements about competitors. To him, it’s all part of the game. That’s not my focus here.

His point is worth talking about.

I want to state quite clearly that I have never taken a payment for a review and never will. Sure I’ve been offered money for a review a couple of times. But it would be completely unethical for me to take it. I couldn’t sleep at night if I did that. Companies that have offered to pay me have never been written about on TechCrunch.

But let’s put that easy case aside for a moment. What about the more subtle ways that journalists can be influenced in what they write about, and what they say?

Steve Gillmor, taking up my defense and responding to Jason, says “we all have conflicts, there is no such thing as objectivity.”

He’s right. It’s impossible to be objective. Impossible.

Ok, I don’t take payments for reviews. But let’s discuss a more subtle case. Google has treated me like yesterday’s trash when it comes to communication. They have a few favorite bloggers that they give news to and I’m not one of them. I tend to be harsh when reviewing their products (but not always). Is this my real opinion, or am I just bitter that I’m not one of Google’s chosen few?

Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox and Ask tend to include me in news embargoes. I often write positively about them (but not always), maybe because I don’t trash them, or maybe because their communication policies aren’t juvenile and retributive. Am I conflicted in my opinions because they include me in their news releases?

Or what about when a company takes me to lunch? Or writes something positive in their blog about TechCrunch before I write about them? Am I barred from writing something positive about them then?

Or here’s the read mind bender – what if I don’t write about a competitor to a company that I like? Doesn’t inaction count as much as action when we’re talking about conflicts? Am I not writing about them because of the company I like, or not writing about them because I just don’t like the service? Should I write about them simply because they are a competitor to a company I wrote something positive about? Some people say yes, absolutely. Well, if I were to do that the blog would get pretty boring pretty quickly.

My point is this: Forget the easy stuff like direct payoffs. I don’t take them and I would be shocked if any large blogger or journalist did. But our lives are full of conflicts and thinking that envelopes full of cash are the only way people get paid off means you are watching too many made-for-tv dramas. Put everything you read through a filter and form your own opinions on things. Don’t look for the golden fountain of objectivity. It doesn’t exist.

I strive to be fair, and say only what I believe the truth to be. But that’s where it ends. Human interaction is simply too complex to pretend that we are all objective.

And a final note on consulting, advisory positions, etc. I am currently an unpaid advisor to Pluck’s Blogburst (and they haven’t asked my opinion on anything recently) and I recently joined the board of a publicly held company. I will also disclose interests in companies I’ve invested in. I am not taking any further advisory or consulting positions for the time being. And that just leaves advertisers on the sites. Since I look for companies that I actually like as advertisers, it’s likely that I will be writing about them. But I will, again, directly disclose this interest at the time of writing. That’s more than most major publications do, but I will hold myself to this standard.

Update: I am becoming an active investor again. I have added a “disclosure” section to the TechCrunch About Page that lists conflicts of interests. I will keep this updated over time.

I first discovered how good Stormhoek wine is at a party I threw at my house a couple of months ago. Stormhoek donated 10 cases of their wine for the event, and people loved it.

A problem, though, is that you can’t buy Stormhoek wine in California. Hugh Macleod is trying to change that. I’m going to ask K&L Wines, down the street from my house, to start carrying the wine. If you live in the bay area, consider doing the same.

If you live in Chicago, make sure to attend Tech Cocktail on July 6. All the cool people will be there.

I don’t understand most of what Steve Gillmor is saying in his most recent post, but I get the feeling that it’s important. Things have changed, and even those of us who are in the middle of all this change don’t know exactly what’s happening. And we certainly don’t know what’s next. One thing is clear – something dramatic happened on the Gillmor Gang recording yesterday, so dramatic that Steve’s not going to publish it. I couldn’t make the show (I was taking an actual, Internet-Free day off), but I sure do want to hear it now that I know I can’t…

The TechCrunch party in London last Monday had great turnout – at least 100 people – and I was able to finally meet in person all of these people that I only knew online before. Nothing beats shaking someone’s hand and looking them in the eye when you talk. I took a ton of great pictures, here. If you have your own, please tag them “techcrunchlondon” on Flickr and they will be added to the group at that link.

Thank you to everyone who attended, and thank you to GNR (the .name domain guys) for sponsoring the event and paying for everyone’s drinks.

Tom Raftery received a cease and desist letter from the General Counsel of CMP Media, who work with Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle to put on the Web 2.0 Conference each fall. The letter demands that Tom stop his use of the term “Web 2.0″ in a conference he’s putting on. The letter states that the use of the term is under a trademark application in connection with live events, conferences, etc.

My favorite line of the letter: “…the public have come to associate the mark Web 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Conference with CMP and MediaLive.”

I have to say that when I think of web 2.0, CMP is not the first name that pops into my head. O’Reilly and Battelle sure. CMP, no.

I sense that a lynching is about to occur in the blogosphere, and Tim O’Reilly is going to be the person lynched. Bloggers aren’t going to trouble themselves with the fact that this letter is from CMP, not O’Reilly (Tim may not know about it).

They are going to shoot first and ask questions later – Shel Israel, for example, wrote “O’Reilly has just put himself on the fast track to reputation implosion” and he may be right.

Update: O’Reilly responds.

Ouriel Ohayon, who writes TechCrunch France, reports that the blog may be the largest French blog, and certainly in the top five. And it’s been live just 4 months. Congratulations, Ouriel. Nicely done.

When Richard MacManus declared Web 2.0 dead last year, I said he was crazy. Web 2.0 isn’t about a definition, its about what’s happening on the web today.

Well, Richard now proclaims that Web 2.0 is back, or that it never went away, or generally that he’s claiming it as his own again. His primary reason for re-accepting it seems to be that he heard IBM and Gartner employees using the term recently.

While I enjoy watching Richard struggle with his inner self, and trying to find security in his beliefs, I think I’ll carry on as I have – mostly ignoring the debate and focusing on the companies that are defining the new web.

I don’t mean this to be harsh, I just find the endless debates hard to take seriously. When people ask me what web 2.0 means to me, I say it’s about conversations, a generical and hard to dispute answer that quickly ends the discussion. When they ask me about the future, I say “mobile” and “web as the OS”. Again, the discussion ends quickly. Then we can talk about what I love – the latest consumer web app that everyone’s trying out and writing about.

A group of web 2.0 entrepreneurs and enthusiasts will be getting together in central London this coming Monday, May 22, 2006. This is an open event, please attend if you like.

Location: Pitcher & Piano, 69-70 Dean Street, Soho, London
Time: 7 pm onwards

Please feel free to reblog this and invite others. I can be reached on my US cell at +19253240713.

UPDATE: GNR, the .name domain registry, is sponsoring the event and will purchase the first GBP200 worth of drinks. Thank you, GNR! You can say thank you by registering a .name domain name at your favorite domain name registrar (I have one, arrington.name).

I knew I shouldn’t have gotten involved when JupiterMedia’s Alan Meckler decided to rip into Om Malik, but I did. I opened my big fat mouth and now Alan’s decided to call me out.

Alan – I apologize. I wasn’t the one to compare TechCrunch to Internet.com, Om did. I don’t know if I’m bigger or smaller than your Internet.com site because I don’t read it and don’t consider it a competitor. Trust me, I have plenty of drama in my life and I’d just like to stay quiet and write about startups, which is my passion.

But to answer your questions, TechCrunch had a little over 3.5 million page views last month. For advertisers, we publicly say 3 million. Again I don’t know, or care, whether that’s bigger or smaller than your Internet.com site.

Because it’s already extinct.

Snap.com relaunched, and paid for a ton of advertising on TechCrunch through our ad partner, FM Publishing.

Here’s what I don’t get: why didn’t they contact me and other bloggers about the launch to tell us about it? I certainly would have written, sending them a lot more traffic than will click on those ads. And it would have been free.

Snap, I appreciate the advertising. But next time, just pick up a phone.

I woke up this morning to a complete clusterfuck.

People are leaving comments calling me everything they can think of in response to the redesign of the TechCrunch.com blog.

We relaunched TechCrunch last Friday morning. The goal was to clean up the advertising (it was all over the place before) and to expand the text area to allow for bigger screen shots. That’s it. Nothing else.

People screamed, in the comments to the post above and elsewhere. That’s ok, people scream at me all the time. I try to delete the comments where people threaten to kill me, my dog or my family, or rape my mother (approximately one per week, and no, I’m not exaggerating). I also delete comments that attack other people unfairly. But for the most part, if you want to take a shot at me, I’ll leave it up. I’ve grown a fairly thick skin. The comments that discuss raping my mother still get to me, of course, but I guess this is all part of having a blog.

So when the negative comments came in I just sort of rolled with it. A number of people made some good suggestions which we implemented. Other ideas were still baking and may or may not have made it eventually into TechCrunch. Anyway, I spoke at a conference on Friday, left for Spain, and have been offline for a lot of the last few days. In my mind, I was glad that we relaunched, I was happy with the new design and I looked forward to tweaking bits and pieces over time to make it better.

And I want to reiterate, I like the new design. It isn’t perfect, but we needed to launch and iterate from there. I was and am happy with the work that my designer did, and I supported her publicly and privately. I also stated publicly, “Everything wonderful about the new design is because of the awesome Rachel Cunliffe, my designer. Everything wrong with it is my fault for overrulling some of her ideas.”

Yesterday, Jeremy Baines sent me a private email with his vision of the TechCrunch redesign. I was impressed that someone I barely know would go to the trouble to do a mockup of the way he would have done TechCrunch. I liked many aspects of it. So I posted it on this blog.

Was I undermining my designer by doing this? Hell no. I was showing support for people that wanted to help me. If I thought Jeremy’s design was so hot, I would have implemented it. I thought it was incredibly cool that someone would do a mockup like that, and so I posted it.

But my designer didn’t see things the same way. She was upset, felt that this was somehow my way of saying that I don’t approve of her work, and resigned (I found out about it by reading a trackback on my own blog). Valleywag knew about her resignation hours before I did.

Now I suspect that my “thick skin” makes it harder for me to understand why Rachel would quit on me just because I posted a screen shot that someone sent me. Again, I want to stress that I have, many times, written about how great Rachel is.

If you think about this from my point of view, you get this: People call me names and scream over just about everything I do. What I write about. What I don’t write about. How many ads I have. Whatever. The comments don’t impact me as much as they use to. I like the new design, and haven’t waivered. My posting of Jeremy’s mockup yesterday was not a signal that I don’t like the current design. It was a signal that I appreciate people who take the time to do things like that. Nothing more. If Rachel chose to take that post as a different message, and resign in the middle of the night publicly, so be it. I would have preferred to have a discussioin with her about it, but she chose the path.

So anyway, I’m going to go back to writing about companies, which is my passion. I’ll keep doing it until the benefits no longer outweigh the costs.

I also want to make one thing clear. I like feedback, and I appreciate even negative feedback. It’s important to hear what people think about what I write. If I didn’t think it was important, I’d choose to use a different publishing format than blogging. This is a two way conversation. Yes, the random, anonymous, hateful stuff sucks, but it doesn’t suck enough to turn off comments, or edit them like some other bloggers do.

Jeremy Baines sent me a screen shot of the way he would have changed TechCrunch. I’m impressed. There is a lot here that I intend to steal. Thanks Jeremy!

This is funny, and I applaud the effort. Someone has created an anonymous wordpress blog mocking the discussion around Josh Kopelman’s 53,651 post about TechCrunch and the startup whirlwind we are in.

Makes me kind of miss ShitCrunch. I never did find out who wrote that.

I’ll have more to say about Josh’s post soon, by the way.

I’ve just arrived in Zaragoza, Spain for the Innovate conference. It’s 2:30 in the morning, Spain time, and I’m a mess.

Why? It all started when I realized my housekeeper had washed my passport (my fault, not hers) just a few days before I was to leave. I spent a large part of the week getting a replacement and in doing so pissed off a bunch of people because I had to reschedule or cancel meetings.

Then, we rolled out the new TechCrunch look on Thursday night, so I didn’t sleep much (I was up until 5 am taking my beating in the comments like a man). On Friday, after little sleep, I rushed to Tiecon to moderate a panel on Web 2.0 that ended at 4 pm. My flight to London was at 7 pm and I hadn’t packed yet, so I rushed home, packed and got to the airport just in time for the flight.

Other than getting no sleep on the flight because I’m 6’4 and the flight attendants bang my knees every time they come by with the trolley (and then give me a dirty look), everything went smoothly in London and on the flight to Madrid. But then things fell apart. Mostly because I had gone two full days without sleeping, and I was pissy about all of the damn “too green” comments about TechCrunch.

People here in Spain don’t speak Spanish. Or at least the Spanish that I learned in high school from my Mexican Spanish teacher. I don’t understand what they’re saying, and they certainly don’t understand me. This lisp thing, whatever the reason for it, just sounds wrong to me. Even getting a taxi to the train station from the Madrid airport was impossible.

And the conference, as I mentioned, is in Zaragoza, far from Madrid. I knew I had to buy a train ticket. But I wrote the name down wrong. Instead of Zaragoza, I wrote Zarazoga. So I needed to say (with a lisp) Thhereathhoga, but I was saying Zaragoza. They literally couldn’t understand me. And when they finally did, they notified me that the train was sold out.

I’ve never heard of a train selling out. You go to the train station, you buy a ticket, you get on the train. They don’t sell out.

I went to the informatioin booth to find out what hotel I should stay in, and try to book a train ticket for tomorrow. They didn’t speak English, and my Lating American Spanish got me nowhere.

Then I realized I could rent a car…I mean, how big is Spain anyway? If all of Europe is the size of the US (it is, economy wise, but close enough), then Spain must be about the size of the bay area, right? I could rent a car and probably beat the train there.

I got a car (this was actually pretty easy), got a map and headed off just as the sun set. I drove West towards Portugal becasue it was dark and I misread highways A1 and A2 on the map (don’t do this). Zarazoga is actually East. That killed an hour. When I finally found the right way, it was very dark and very late and the only music on the radio was really bad Euro club music (no Gypsy Kings). So I pulled out my iPod and cranked up Eminem because I was feeling angry and sorry for myself. I had the iPod in one hand and a Red Bull in another hand and the steering wheel in there someplace. People here drive really fast, I noticed right about then, and pass aggresively on either side of you (just like the US). But this car has power steering and my car at home doesn’t and I oversteered trying to move away from the rushing lights and nearly killed myself.

And by the way, Spain is significantly bigger than the bay area.

But I finally arrived in Zaragoza at about 1 am after a very long drive across a significant part of this country. I had the hotel address written down, but the streets here aren’t marked. They just aren’t. I dare anyone to prove otherwise. Being who I am, I refused to stop and ask for directions in my broken Spanish. I just drove around the city for an hour, street by street, until I found the hotel.

Everything is good now though. The hotel has excellent wifi access. I may not leave the room again until I have to leave.

Update: Did someone link to this? The comments keep coming, and they’re getting a big aggressive.

I apologize for any offense, none was intended. I was mostly making fun of myself. I’ve lived in Europe three different times and have visited Spain on multiple occasions. I enjoyed my time there and the people, as always, are very friendly.

We pushed a new TechCrunch site tonight with a very different look and feel (see below). Everything wonderful about the new design is because of the awesome Rachel Cunliffe, my designer. Everything wrong with it is my fault for overrulling some of her ideas.

I loved the old TechCrunch, which Frederico Oliveira designed last summer, but it’s time for a change. In particular I wanted to expand the text are from 455 pixels to 570 to allow for much larger screenshots. We’ve also made some changes to allow for more advertising, in a more logical way (ads were all over the place until today).

I’m really excited about the “TechCrunch Sponsors” area of the site in the top right. This is an area where people can purchase a permanent presence on TechCrunch and gain access to our audience. We’re going to be very selective about the brands we allow there – we’re not just putting their logos up, we’re saying that we believe in the product as well.

Great feedback is coming in already, please keep it coming. Ouriel Ohayon, who writes TechCrunch France, has a poll up on his personal site for direct feedback on the new TechCrunch.

And if you’re wondering about the green theme, there’s a reason for it (hint – it keeps me focused on my goals). It has nothing to do with a ValleyWag post talking about HulkCrunch.

TechCrunch should (fingers crossed) be launching a new look and feel sometime on Friday. As part of this we are taking permanent sponsorships for the site (on the site for a month or more for one set price). If you are interested, please ping me at editor@techcrunch.com and I’ll let you know the details. There is a minimum two month commitment to start.

I believe we’ve now sold three of the four slots.

I can’t imagine a better advertising strategy than this one. Thanks Orli.

Anyone know what BitScrap is?

Damn, I missed Dave Winer’s birthday earlier this week while I was off screwing around at a conference.

Happy Birthday Dave!!!

You’ve been a good friend and I wish you many, many more healthy and happy birthdays in the years to come.

You’ve given so much to the blogosphere…what can we give back to you?