Wow, who woulda thought that I’d click with the guy who spent three minutes on video calling me a “pompous elitist asshole” while he lied naked in bed. But Loren Feldman is a funny dude and has some pretty intelligent things to say. I had a blast hanging out with him yesterday at the Mesh Conference in Toronto (although I was drinking heavily for about half the time we spent together). Here I am below on his show, showing off my new speaker gift - red underwear…

Forget the fact that he created TechMeme, you haven’t made it in silicon valley until you’ve been asked to do a gadget recommendation for Business Week. Gabe Rivera says the “De’Longhi Magnifica saves me a lot of time performing an essential function: making delicious coffee.”

Nice picture.

I just finished a longish review post about GrandCentral on TechCrunch. This brings back memories - for the first year or so of TechCrunch I mostly did long product reviews, really sinking my teeth into the meet of the services I wrote about. It’s actually what I love most about my job, but it takes a lot of time and the payoff isn’t nearly as big in terms of links and page views as breaking news.

I think I’m going to make the time to do more of these, particularly for services that are clearly unique and have a real chance of getting a lot of users on board. There is no better way to really know how a product works (and how it compares to competitors) than to test it for hours and know every corner of it. I can’t do this for all, or even most, of the companies we cover. But I can hopefully find the time to write at least one or two per week.

GrandCentral is just a really cool service. And I have a feeling it isn’t going to be an independent company for long.

I really enjoyed reading Dave McClure’s list of reasons why PR firms are often unable to meet their client’s goals. So many of them don’t understand how blogs and new media work in general, and approach us in entirely the wrong way.

It’s great advice. if you are in PR and you represent clients who want or need blog coverage, you should read it.

The second Next Web Conference is in Amsterdam in a week or so. I’m looking forward to attending. Marc Canter and I will be sitting in a “special” area and have been given full permission to “comment” on all the presentations. We’ll make asses of ourselves, I’m sure. Looking forward to it.

I was just reading some of the commentary about the Google/Feedburner story from earlier today. We confirmed the previous rumor, and the story was soon up on Digg and Slashdot, although Slashdot called us “TechDirt”. That’s ok, though, they got the link right.

The spam blogs were out in force, with 10-12 blogs lifting the article wholesale and without attribution. That’s pretty normal, but what isn’t normal is for a large blogger to get tricked into thinking a spam blog was the actual source, and linking to it.

Randy Charles Morin, a respected blogger with nearly 10,000 RSS subscribers, seems to have fallen for it though. He linked to a blog that lifted our article and reposted it word-for word and without any attribution at all.

That’s not good. I don’t mind losing the link that much, but I do mind if spam blogs start to see a real return on their infringement because big blogs mistakenly link to them. That can give others an incentive to start their own, and the problem gets worse. It’s also embarrassing for the blogosphere when a respected blog makes an error like this.

I’ve copied both posts below. Ours on top, the spam blog on bottom.

A lot of people misunderstood my point in the post I wrote last night about how much less fun Silicon Valley is during the boom times (or just failed to actually read it). Lots of unscolicited advice (yeah, I know how to say No, but thanks for the lovely condescension). And my post wasn’t about whether or not we’re in a bubble. All I said was that we are in the money phase of this cycle, and Silicon Valley loses its specialness when the money people roll in.

I didn’t say the party is over. In fact, it may just be getting started and we’re all going to make a lot more money, I’m sure. But the soul of SV went on vacation again, and I look forward to it coming back.