I’m currently in the airport at Frankfurt, in a holding room reserved for flight transfers that don’t have to go through customs. No food, water or bathroom, but by God they have wifi and I am happy.

I’ll be arriving in Istanbul later today and staying through the weekend. More on that later.

The blogosphere (but not CNET) seems to have moved on from this weekend’s diversionary game of whack-a-blogger. Valleywag started the mud slinging by suggesting that a bunch of FM authors, including me, were taking payoffs to write advertising content.

That wasn’t the case (see my previous posts on my position), but it didn’t stop authors like Malik and Kedrosky from immediately folding, and FM CEO Battelle from giving his authors a quick slap on the wrist for not disclosing the “conflict.” Suddenly I found myself fighting alone in a sea of controversy, which is right where I like to be. The main fallout from the event is that we are now looking for new ad agent representation.

Lots of bloggers took Valleywag’s side in this. I don’t agree with them, but I’m willing to engage in intelligent debate about the subject because I respect them. Dave Winer, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Mathew Ingram, Jeff Jarvis, and others are of the opinion this was the wrong thing to do.

But one man, Charles Cooper at CNET, seems to think this is his own personal Watergate scandal to exploit for his own professional gain. He’s taken the opportunity to write three articles now on CNET trashing the bloggers involved. His writing shows a distinct lack of interest in the facts of the matter - instead he’s on a personal crusade to sully the reputation of the blogging community in general.

In his original post Cooper made his unbiased position clear when he wrote “I sent e-mails both to Arrington and Malik and–surprise, surprise–heard nothing back.” For that I called him an idiot, because he obviously doesn’t know a thing about Malik and me. We both comment early and often on anything and everything. His “surprise, surprise” comment tells me he’s never read our blogs and knows nothing about how we operate. It was also clear from his article that he was jumping into a mob lynching, and screw the facts.

In his follow up article he referred to my idiot comment but left out the reason why (now I get to say, “surprise, surprise” Cooper) and included more attacks on our credibility. I ignored that one, as I certainly couldn’t fault someone for fighting back after being called an idiot.

For the record, I was in the car during the 45 minute window Cooper decided was long enough to wait before bashing me. Otherwise, I would have had the opportunity to call him an idiot much sooner.

But today he’s back, attacking the blogosphere again and saying we need to get serious about “church and state.”

This man knows nothing about blogging.

Most of the popular blogs, all of which started out as one-person shops, have now hired separate sales staff to handle sales. We have, Om has, etc. Hell, that’s the main reason we are working with FM Publishing, so that we don’t have to talk to advertisers directly. They turned out to be the wrong choice - throwing us under a bus as soon as the found it convenient, but it doesn’t change our position on the matter. We’re a small operation, we work 24 hours a day to break stories and write interesting content, and we’re trying to earn enough money to keep these things growing. Something Cooper would never understand.

He’s a paid journalist who has the luxury of sitting back and opining on others, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s what too many mainstream media journalists do - write about things they don’t know and don’t care about. And that’s why blogs are stealing their page views at an alarming rate. Based on my estimates, the average A-List blogger generates 10x the page views that the average journalist does. Why? Because we’re running our own businesses, because we support each other with linking, and because we care, deeply, about what we are writing about.

Those are things Cooper has no understanding of.

And while we are on the topic of CNET, let’s talk about the ethical position of their editorial staff. They are famous for stealing stories that bloggers got to first. When we broke the Google - Youtube acquisition, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both credited us for the story. But when we broke the Microsoft-Tellme acquisition, CNET wrote about it too (three weeks later) but didn’t give credit (even though it was widely discussed in the blogosphere). I let it go, since a link from Om sends a lot more page views than a link from CNET anyway. But if you ask a few tech bloggers if the same thing happened to them, they’ll tell you it did.

Another lovely CNET moment - the day they wrote an article criticizing TechCrunch for having typos.

(note that there are exceptions at CNET - Elinor Mills in particular, who’s an awesome writer and who has a standing job offer to come work for us at TechCrunch should she ever desire a substantial raise and stock options. The ZDNet staff is equally excellent.)

For these and other reasons, CNET is but a shadow of its former self.

So I apologize if I am hesitant to take advice from an uninformed and conflicted journalist who works for CNET. You represent everything that we bloggers are trying to kill, so excuse us if we choose to work out our issues without your input.

The next time you feel the need to condescend to the blogosphere and tell us what we need to do, Cooper, just stop. ‘Cause you aren’t in the club and your opinions are irrelevant. When you say “but I’m not sure we’re any closer to agreeing on the answer” to your church/state question, you forget that no one considers you worthy to be at the table participating in the debate.

You’d be much better off starting a blog of your own and seeing what this world is all about. In the meantime, why don’t you go write a story about Google acquiring GrandCentral. It was yesterday’s news, so it’s right up your alley.

Want to go another round, Cooper? I’m up for it. I’ve been trashed daily by Valleywag and hundreds of others for two years now. Nothing you can say will be nearly as difficult to handle (you aren’t half as smart, or 1/3 as mean, as Nick Denton), and I can throw mud with the best of them. But if you’ve had enough, good. Because I’d like to get back to writing about startups, if you don’t mind.

Update - I’m glad to see Dave Winer write on this as well. I wrote this before reading his post. We use different words but seem to come to a similar conclusion - get out of our business, Cooper. Dave’s light criticisms hurt far worse than anything you could ever write. And I also note Donna Bogatin’s post (she’s a former CNET/ZDNet writer), where she points to a little hypocrisy at CNET.

More happenings on the sponsored text debate: John Battelle, CEO of FM Publishing, the ad network behind the ads, throw his authors, including us, under a bus today when he writes:

I think the key, as Scoble says, is to disclose. Our draft principles say:

Appearing in Ads: If you lend your voice or name to copy in an ad unit (for instance, “My dream search engine would operate on my spoken word,”) disclose that fact and your relationship with the advertiser, if any, in a post or on a disclosure page.

I think that’s absolutely right, and I wish all our authors did this before running the campaign.

hmm. Disclose? Disclose what? That the text inside of an ad unit is an ad? Thanks, John. Classy move.

I’m now pissed off at every single person involved in this. Denton for bringing up a non issue to attack competitors, Malik for folding immediately and making it seem like someone did something wrong, and now Battelle, our agent, saying he wished we had made a disclosure on this.

Any competing ad networks out there want our business, and promise not to throw us under a bus whenever Valleywag attacks?

Just for the record, here’s the horrible, horrible text that everyone says blows TechCrunch’s credibility permanently. It was contained within an obvious ad unit - a banner ad.

TechCrunch wasn’t much fun in the very early days. We were mostly talking to ourselves because readers were scarce. But as the site grew and more readers came along, things got exciting. The discussion in the comments to each blog post was as or more compelling than the actual news we were reporting. People’s opinions matter, and intelligent debate stimulates the mind. TechCrunch became People Ready.

We’ve added more software over time to engage our community and encourage even more active participation. Most recently we launched a discussion called TechCrunch Forums where anyone can talk about anything they like, without being tied to the current content on TechCrunch. Conversation has blossomed, and some of the most interesting ideas I’ve seen originate there.

We are always looking for more ways to pull down barriers and connect people. And we’ll keep experimenting, keeping the things that work.

The title, which is a quote from the movie casablanca, is what came to mind tonight when I read the complete train wreck occuring on TechMeme over advertisements that contain a written message from the publisher. The whole thing was started by Valleywag of course.

The ads in question are a staple of FM Publishing - a standard ad unit contains a quote by the publisher saying something about something. It isn’t a direct endorsement. It certainly isn’t a product endorsement. Rather, it’s usually an answer to some lame slogan created by the advertiser. It makes the ad more personal and has a higher click through rate, or so we’ve been told. In the case of the Microsoft ad, we were quoted how we had become “people ready,” whatever that means. See our answer and some of the others here (I think it will be hard to find this text controversial, or anything other then extremely boring). We do these all the time…generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. This has been going on for months and months - at least since the summer of 2006. It’s nothing new. It’s text in an ad box. I think people are pretty aware of what that means…which is nothing.

Let me reiterate. It’s an ad unit. You know what goes on in ad units? Advertising.

Shocking.

Valleywag says its wrong. Om Malik, an innocent babe in the woods when it comes to being on the receiving end of valleywag attacks, folded, apologized and had the ads pulled. Someone over at CNET jumped on the bandwagon, saying we were all pimping advertisers slogans. He emailed us (I was driving to Foo camp and offline), and shortly thereafter wrote “surprise, surprise–heard nothing back.” Yeah, that’s me, shrinking from controversy and afraid to answer emails. I just wrote back to the reporter, calling him an idiot for falling into this trap.

Even Dave Winer threw a few logs on the fire, while acknowledging that Valleywag is generally full of shit.

So here’s my position on all of this: Go pound sand. People understand that if there’s text in an ad box, someone is paying for it to be there.

The main thing I’m pissed off about right now is that they pulled all the ads, which mean we’re taking a revenue hit. We’re running a business here, and have payroll to make. We run ads to make that payroll. Those ads have now been pulled.

And perhaps Malik, Wilson and Kedrosky, who’ve all complimented and often linked to valleywag and have never been on the receiving end of their attacks before today, will realize how quickly that dog will turn on you. Valleyway picks its fights carefully, always attacking competitors but one at a time, while praising the rest of the crowd to keep them at bay. It’s high school bullying 101. And it works just as well in the blogging world as it did back then before we knew better. Divide and conquer. Shameful for those who sit on the sidelines and watch it all happen. And all of these guys have done exactly that.

TechCrunch was barely crawling this evening, due to a double slowdown from two third party apps on the site. Stripped both out, and the site is humming. Fastest load time I’ve ever seen.

I received a funny email string today from someone who was trying to contact me with a story pitch. He requested my phone number and I didn’t get back to him right away because I’m way behind on email. I guess he reached out to others to get advice on how to contact us. The email string below is pretty funny.

I do give out my cell phone, I just don’t answer it very often because it never stops ringing. I prefer to have meetings after 10 pm because that’s when things slow down. And the editor@techcrunch email just goes to me, no one else.

Michael -

Just received the note from some of my PR buddies. Guess I shouldn’t have asked you for your phone number last week – I had NO idea it was such a sensitive issue. Anyway – I’ll continue to reach out to you for xxxxx this way. Sorry about the request.

xxxxx
—— Forwarded Message
From:
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:45:10 -0700
To: ‘xxxxx
Subject: FW: Need your help - looking for two reporters

FYI… I seriously advice not calling him – this is what EVERYONE has told me.

From:
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 9:37 AM
To: xxxxx
Subject: Re: Need your help - looking for two reporters

he doesn’t give it out - and if you get it don’t call it because he’ll blacklist you.

Best way to get Mike is to email him between Midnight and 2am - seriously.

also, send a mail to editor@techcrunch which all the writers, Nick, Duncan, etc. monitor.

Donna Bogatin loves to stir the pot and create a little controversy. She’s written over 1,500 posts at her Digital Markets blog at ZDNet, many of them taking a few friendly shots at me.

She’s now started her own blog, Insider Chatter. It looks like she isn’t changing her trademark approach much; if anything her posts are even more irreverent now that she isn’t answering to Dan Farber at ZDNet. I hope she keeps both blogs going, it’s fun to watch her pick fights.