Someone from Google Checkout called me on Friday to discuss a comment I made at TechCrunch about the product. Due to a cell phone carrier change the message was lost. Please contact me again to discuss.
Sorry to everyone else who reads this post and who’s time I just wasted. I’d go through Google PR to make contact but, well, that would involve talking to Google PR, which can be a chilling experience.
I’ve spoken to Steve Gillmor multiple times over the last week and we’ve agreed that I’ll rejoin the Gillmor Gang starting immediately. I’m looking forward to the next show.
Valleywag has run a number of posts recently that mostly have served to make me look like an ass. Many of these have been flat out factually incorrect, and sometimes the blog has run retractions.
That’s ok, it comes with having a high profile blog. But now it looks like Nick Douglas, who writes the blog, is emailing startups to see if I’ve secretly invested in them in preparation for a hit piece. An email string that was forwarded to me is below (with names redacted).
Valleywag’s singling out of TechCrunch and their promotion of non-stories is annoying, but I also now question Valleywag’s and parent company Gawker’s real intentions. TechCrunch competes with a number of Gawker sites and I’ve announced my intention to launch more sites in the future, becoming a direct Gawker competitor. I therefore question Gawker’s true intentions when running these attack posts.
For what it’s worth, any conficts of interest are spelled out clearly on the TechCrunch About Page. Any accusations that I am promoting or slamming startups for any reason other than I enjoy doing it will be taken very seriously. Nick, if you are going to engage in libel, be sure you have your facts straight. This isn’t funny anymore.
From:
Date: July 30, 2006 10:52:00 AM PDT
To: “Mike Arrington”
Subject: Fwd: Does Michael Arrington have a stake in your company?fyi
looks like nick might be running a hit piece on you. I told him that you are not an investor.
From: [nick douglas]
Date: July 30, 2006 11:32:13 AM PDT
To:
Subject: Re: Does Michael Arrington have a stake in your company?Thanks for the info. I’ll try to be fair, in that special Gawker Media
way, about Arrington.On 7/30/06, wrote:
nick - I respect mike.He is not an investor in xxxxx.
more importantly, I believe mike is a person of very high integrity and it
would be a shame if your blog tried to state otherwise. He is one of the
good guys in silicon valley who is truly interested in technology.From: “Nick Douglas”
Date: July 30, 2006 9:36:09 AM PDT
To:
Subject: Does Michael Arrington have a stake in your company?On Valleywag, I’m about to switch to some more serious questioning of Michael Arrington’s methods. As part of that questioning, I’d like to confirm whether Michael Arrington is an investor or advisor to xxxxx.
Note that if he is, this means nothing bad about xxxxx but raises some questions about Arrington. This information would be used as part of a longer series investigating Arrington’s relationships with many companies. Yours will not be singled out.
Maybe I spoke to soon when criticizing Technorati CEO Dave Sifry’s advice yesterday on how to build a successful blog (see “Um, What About, You Know, Content?“). Data Mining has a post that points to Technorati’s current Top 100 blog list - showing Technorati at the top of the list. 
I note that Wired Magazine’s list of things to do to “Make Your Blog Popular” doesn’t include anything about writing good and compelling content, but it does have things like “optimize for search engines” and “post, post, post!”. This advice supposedly comed from Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, who’s a friend of mine. I can’t believe this is Dave’s unedited advice.
The game will be completely over before old media even knows what happened.
Just a quick note: every once in a while I write about a company on TechCrunch that really sticks with me. Riya, Pandora, digg, etc. The most recent one is Gotuit, which we wrote about here. If you like watching music videos, try it out. I just wish there was an easier way to get links directly to the videos. The only way I can figure out how to do it is by emailing the video to myself and using the link in the email. Anyway, I highly recommend this. Favorite video right now: Beck, “Girl”.
Jason Calacanis is the master of getting inside of our heads. He’s singlehandedly doing what his entire staff combined cannot - keeping Netscape alive in the minds of the early adopter crowd. His product may be flailing, but man, he’s great at guerilla PR. Digg founder Kevin Rose is pissed about the whole thing, and I’ve never seen Kevin anywhere near pissed before.
