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.

I’ve been on Gillmor Gang for a few months now and until recently thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It’s controversial, intelligent and fun. Steve was wonderful to include me. Yesterday however I resigned from the show, on air, when Steve pushed me on my ongoing participatioin.

The reason I resigned is that Steve has invited Nick Carr on the show “whenever he wants to attend”. Nick’s been on two shows now. The first one I quickly dropped off, the second one, yesterday, I stayed until the end. I have a problem with Nick. I think he’s smart but he’s often overly cruel to people in his posts, people who sometimes aren’t in a position to defend themselves. I get the sense that he enjoys pulling people down, gets happiness out of it. He shows all the classic signs of a bully – he talks big on his blog but on the phone he’s a meek, submissive guy. He can’t stand up to people who stand up to him unless he’s hiding behind his blog. Guys like Nick are a dime a dozen on the Internet and until now I just basically ignored him. But I won’t be on a weekly podcast with the guy. If Nick is on the show, I’m not on it.

Long ago I made the choice not to associate with people who are mean to others. They can attack me all they want (Jason Calacanis does, and he’s on the show, and I have no problem with that). But when you are mean to other people it just makes my blood boil. It probably comes from watching too many kids get picked on in junior high.

I wasn’t going to write about this, I don’t want or need any more controversy in my life and frankly this isn’t that important to me or anyone who reads this blog. But clearly a fight is coming to me. Nick posted on his blog about it. Steve at first said he’d edit out my resignation and keep things quiet. But now he says he’s keeping it in the show. Valleywag is pinging him for the details, and it’s clear that Steve wants to set up a three ring circus around the situation to generate “attention” for the Gillmor Gang. I’m sure he’ll get that attention.

Some people are going to think this is all because Nick called me a whore a while back. It’s not about that – I get called lots worse every day. But that was when I first noticed his blog and started to read him. And what I saw wasn’t pretty.

This is the last time I’ll comment on this.

And by the way Steve, this doesn’t affect our friendship, and you are now on the party wiki list as promised.

A fish tank toilet.

Marshall wrote a post about a new startup called OpenDNS today at TechCrunch. OpenDNS requires a fairly easy setting change to your computer or router and in return offers free protection from phishing sites (by not allowing you to go to them), as well as speedier surfing. OpenDNS will make money by serving ads when domain names are mistyped badly (minor mistypes are actually corrected for you). The service itself is free. For more details, see the post.

He gave it a mostly negative review after testing it and talking to a number of people who are experts in this area. He also mentioned, quite correctly, that SiteAdvisor provides some of the same protective features (but siteadvisor does not address the speed issue).

I tested out OpenDNS myself after his post and probably for the first time had a significantly different opinion than him on a product. It does seem to speed up my surfing, which alone makes the product worth using in my opinon. I don’t really care about the phishing protection, since I am unlikely to be fooled by, or even visit, such a site. But many people may find this feature useful.

It’s hard to let someone else express opinions that I may disagree with on the blog that I spent a year building up from scratch. But I also like that Marshall is willing to make controversial calls on new products and back up those calls with intelligent arguments. Different opinions are good.

But I’m right on this one.

JD Lasica is a journalist that has been interviewing people on video for some time. I caught up with him at the Gnomedex conference a couple of weeks ago and we sat down to talk for a few minutes about TechCrunch and the state of web startups in general. One thing I learned from this is that I’m still not comfortable watching myself on video – but in any event you can see it here if you are interested. Thanks JD – I’m honored to be included in the group of people you’ve interviewed.

It’s not often that I give up on testing a new service during the registration process, but today I did. I was taking a look at a new service called folkd and couldn’t get it to accept my password. Then I noticed that they have “password guidelines”:

Your password must have a length of 6 chars at least and three of the following 4 rules must match:

* – Your password has to contain one number at least.
* – Your password has to contain one special char at least.
* – Your password has to contain big chars.
* – Your password has to contain small chars.

We’re not talking about online banking here – make it easy on your users to try out your service. Unless Folkd is something very special, it won’t get my attention again.

I attended the Next Web conference in Amsterdam last Friday and spoke about hot startups (with a focus on European companies). It was a great conference and I look forward to attending again next year (even though I’m not on their list of desired speakers. )

Ronnie Overgoor was there filming everyone, asking for their definition of the Next Web. I’m first on the video and, if you make it to the end, I have a short snippet there as well where they ask my name. My answer? Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, of course (we all have to have our heroes).

Dave Winer writes about an Amazon S3 application that he’s hacked up and is using. Anyone know about any public applications available on this? Dave, care to share what you’ve built? Hope it’s on your Mac…

Amazon S3 team interview podcast is here on TalkCrunch. TechCrunch profile is here.

A year ago Steve Gillmor made a late night bet with Robert Scoble and me that Pandora wouldn’t last a year. We settled the bet last weekend at the Gnomedex conference, and Steve paid us $10 each. As far as I know Steve has never admitted to being wrong about anything, ever (his general policy is to amend the historical record so that his story matches the eventual reality). I’m glad to see he’s finally willing to admit that his predictions aren’t a lock. And of course Pandora is doing quite well.