One of the Wired predictions for 2007 caught my eye: “Digg Becomes the New Friendster…Digg holds out for a big payday but ends up like Friendster (i.e., no friends).” It caught my eye because Wired owns Digg competitor Reddit. Now that they are in the startup game, they need to be aware of those pesky conflicts of interest.

So we received one of the Microsoft computers the other day that everyone’s been screaming about. I don’t think this is much of a scandal, because Microsoft is being pretty open about exactly what they are doing - giving away computers loaded with Vista to bloggers in the hope that they are more likely to write about it. Here’s the email they sent out:

Michael,

I’m working on getting some review PCs out to community bloggers, and wanted to include you. I’d love to send you a loaded Ferrari 1000 courtesy of Windows Vista and AMD. Are you interested?

This would be a review machine, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS. Full disclosure, while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like. Just let me know what you plan to do with it when the time comes. And if you run into any problems let me know. A few of the drivers aren’t quite final, but are very close.

If you are game, would you send me your address and phone? I’m going to send this out next week, so if you will be travelling on the 22nd let me know where you’ll be, and I’ll send it there.

Thanks,

xxxxxxx

This email came from a Microsoft employee, not Edelman, so I don’t have any reason to believe Edelman was involved. And even if they are, I think it’s a brilliant move.

And anyway it doesn’t really matter. Microsoft did something smart, because many of us wouldn’t have taken the time to download and install Vista on our own computers. The fact that it was delivered to us, ready to go, made it a lot easier.

I spent about two hours on the machine the other day, testing out the software. Frankly, I’m pretty impressed, and I’m a hard core Mac guy. I really like that the Live widgets sit on the desktop all the time, instead of behind a hot key like they do on Macs, for example.

The only scandal would be in a blogger who received a computer decides to keep it and then writes about Vista in a positive way and doesn’t disclose the situation. Otherwise, there isn’t much of an issue.

I’m not sure what we are going to do with the computer yet. We may give it away on CrunchGear, although our analyst, Nick, has his eye on it as well.

But whatever we do with it, it’s clear that Vista has come a long way since the pre-release betas. It’s a kick ass operating system.

If you happen to be running it on a $4,000 computer, at least.

Something that annoys me about YouTube is how bad videos usually look before you hit “play”. I just embedded a YouTube video into a techcrunch post and noticed again how terrible it looks.

I think they should have an option for people to upload a still image at the time of uploading the video, and the image can be shown instead of the blurry video stuff you usually see. Alternatively, they could allow the uploader to type in some text as a title, and show that.

Stuff like this is why I still read Dave Winer, even though he pisses me off almost daily. The comment discussion is excellent. I just learned a lot. Hardcore geeky shit that I am not qualified to participate in.

In a WSJ OpEd piece, Josephe Rago says:

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Interesting article, although clearly linkbait, and it can be placed generally in the category of MSM whining about the democratization of journalism. I didn’t expect this out of the WSJ. Full article here.

If you’ve been following the events around the Le Web conference and TechCrunch UK, this might be of interest to you. If not, it won’t. I’m not filling in all the background material to keep this as short as possible.

I’ve thought about the TechCrunch UK issue for a week now, and have come to some conclusions. A lot of public and private anger has been directed at me over putting the blog on hold. For the record I am going to put down the facts as I know them, and then put this thing to bed.

I talk a lot about ethics on our site and how important it is to me to surround myself with “good” people. I certainly make mistakes, but I try to learn from them and I strive to always do what I consider to be the right thing, and treat others fairly. Particularly when they are down.

The situation last week, surrounding the Le Web conference, was in my opinion an example of what can happen when mobs smell blood. People go crazy. I have no personal opinion on the event itself because I wasn’t there. Loic is a personal friend, but frankly I was pretty pissed off at him at the beginning of the conference because he cancelled my trip at the last minute. There’s two sides to that story, but I want to be clear that during the conference I was not very happy with Loic, or the event.

I had no issue with Sam’s first post on the event. He presented why he thought it wasn’t perfect in a balanced way. Since I wasn’t at the event I couldn’t agree or disagree, and regardless I trust our writers to communicate their honest opinions. TechCrunch France Editor Ouriel Ohayon wrote to me saying that the post wasn’t accurate and reflected poorly on us, but my response to him was “I don’t have a problem with that post.”

However, Loic started taking a lot of heat over the event, and he lashed out at Sam, calling him an asshole in the comments. That wasn’t a shining moment for Loic, but these kinds of things happen. Frankly, I far prefer someone who loses their cool every once in a while to people who are always under control and calculating. Being human isn’t a bad thing.

People leave comments like these on TechCrunch all the time. And if I know them personally, I usually email them and ask them if they’d like for me to remove the comment for them. Invariably they say yes after they’ve had a day to cool down, and I delete them. People use blogs to communicate freely, and I want people to know they can speak their mind in our comments section. And if they change their mind later, I’m usually ok with amending those comments.

Loic did two things. He apologized on the blog for the comment, and he emailed back saying if we were willing to remove the original asshole comment, that was great.

I wrote back just to Sam, and said “Please delete his comment and any comments referring to it. Ok with that?”

If Sam had written that we wasn’t ok with that, I would have respected his decision and probably would have forgotten about the whole event by now.

But Sam wrote back saying that he refused to delete the “post.” It was clear that all I asked was that he remove the comment, not the post. This is when things started to get ugly and I realized what Sam’s true intentions might be. He also wrote:

“Sorry Mike unless you respond back to this email telling me to remove the post I will not. I have been asked by several people to run the European event to replace Le Web. Loic has sold out and I don’t think TechCrunch should do the same.”

Now one thing Sam is good at is making money, and events can be profitable. If I went along with this, I’d stand to make a lot of money on a European event.

And frankly I’m absolutely fine competing with Loic. But I’m not fine trashing his conference while promoting our own.

Sam then took another step, highlighting the Loic “asshole” comment and in the same post writing about upcoming events that he would be announcing. That is not ethical.

At this time I was in a blogger meeting at Microsoft, sitting in a room with Bill Gates in a Q&A session. I didn’t have a lot of time to deal with the situation and it seemed to be getting out of control.

I wrote sam an email saying “you realize you just fired yourself, right?” and linked to his new post where he trashed Loic and Le Web while simultaneously promoting his own events.

His immediate response was “Are you asking me to leave? Please confirm”

I responded “Sam, I can’t work with someone who is intentionally cruel. You were, and you did it to gain attention for your own efforts. So, unless you fix this, I won’t be able to work with you any more. The post yesterday was fine. The one today was over the top, particularly after we had discussed removing the comment.”

At that time I assumed that Sam and I would still find a way to work this out. I certainly didn’t expect what came next.

That was the last time we spoke. The next thing Sam did was post on TechCrunch UK that he’d been fired. Based on me saying “fix this or I won’t be able to work with you any more.”

Everything that happened after that is public knowledge. Sam has launched a new site covering European startups. He has a well designed site, and sponsors. After one week.

That tells me that this was all planned long ago, and Sam took this opportunity to create incredible buzz for himself. At my expense. At Loic’s expense.

When I first started working with Sam a number of people emailed me telling me that he was a dishonest person and that I’d regret it. I ignored these emails. Lots of people say lots of horrible things about me all the time, and most of them aren’t true. Perhaps I should have listened.

There is one other matter. Against our policies Sam took direct payment from a number of sponsors for an event he held earlier this year. Despite repeated requests he has never sent the portion of that payment, about $17,000, owed to us. We are never going to see that money.

Could we hire an attorney over all of this? Sure. But even though I’m an attorney, that’s not my style. And frankly, we have better things to do with our time.

So in the end I had the choice between continuing to work with Sam, and possibly making a lot of money on a European event, or being able to sleep well at night. I chose sleeping well.

On a side note, I’m sorry to see writer Mike Butcher caught up in all of this, particularly when his wife is very ill. As far as I know he had no knowledge of the back story: that Sam was trashing Loic to promote his own event, and that I actually never fired him. I hope things work out well with him at Sam’s new startup. And if in the end, Sam screws him over like everyone else he seems to come in contact with, I’ll hire him back at TechCrunch.

Natali Del Conte’s last day with TechCrunch was last Friday. I’ll let her make her own announcement regarding what she’ll do next, but I want to wish her luck on behalf of the entire TechCrunch team. She was here just three weeks, but it’s clear she’s going to be a star at whatever she chooses to do.

Natali gave me a couple of reasons for leaving. She’s gotten an offer from another company (again, I’ll let her make any announcements on that), but was willing to stay on part time with TechCrunch. I appreciate that, but I want our writers to be completely focused on TechCrunch and not working with competitors. She also told me the comments were really getting to her, and the turmoil from last week (TechCrunch UK, NYTimes debacle) played a part as well.

It’s hard to explain how brutal user comments can be. And if you are a woman you often have to deal with sexism as well. Natali was dealing with both. She’s never had that kind of direct, anonymous feedback, and it’s clear it got to her to some extent. I’m very sorry for that.