A Valleywag tipster whispers that a company that had made the initial cut of 20 companies for the Techcrunch40 conference — back when it was known as "TechCrunch20" — got bumped when conference organizers "doubled down" and expanded the list to 40 startups. The company's sin? Competing with a startup funded by one of TechCrunch40's four VC sponsors. The competitor got bumped, and room was made for a sponsor-backed startup. "Ah, the Valley mafia at its finest," the tipster concludes. Of course. Sand Hill Road was built on conflicts of interest.

TechCrunch40 is different, organizer Jason Calacanis claims, from most startup conferences in not charging companies to present there. Never mind that, in fact, he and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington are charging 100 companies to present at the conference's subsidiary DemoPit. The notion was that TechCrunch40 might discover promising companies that couldn't afford to present at a pay-to-play conference. But in reality, most of the 40 startups presenting here don't even need the $50,000 cash award. For them, at most, it might fund a nice victory bash.

I've always had trouble understanding Jason Calacanis's rationalizations for DemoPit, the sleaziest part of the TechCrunch40 conference. Calacanis and his partner-in-wasting-time, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, launched the conference promising not to charge companies to demonstrate, as other startup conferences did. But then Calacanis turned around and announced DemoPit, a side room for also-rans to hawk their Web-based wares. He snuck in the news that the 100 DemoPit participants would have to buy a ticket — a sneaky way to charge, after all, for the right to demonstrate. Taking into account all the direct costs, Calacanis should turn a tidy profit on the sideline, I calculated. When I called him on it, Calacanis blustered and blathered, calling me a "pariah" for daring to question him. Charming. But then I figured it out: Jason Calacanis is Willy Wonka, the magical candyman. And the DemoPit participants are his Oompa Loompas.

Conference paraphernalia is normally comprised of useful but boring office supplies and t-shirts. Except, it seems, at Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis's TechCrunch40 conference. Rafe Needleman of CNET blog Webware is shocked by one giveaway from "natural-language" search engine Powerset — test tubes of cranberry juice and vodka. We're not shocked, of course. We just suspect Powerset CEO Barney Pell is pulling the usual bar pick-up trick of buying drinks for the person you're trying to seduce. Everyone knows you're prettier when they're drunk.

The Web 2.0 startups featured at TechCrunch40 are adorable, really. But they can't compete with the draw of a real business with real, paying customers, Six Apart executive Michael Sippey points out: "Around the corner from tc40 there are 7000 people at salesforce.com's conference." Salesforce.com, unlike most of the startups on display at TechCrunch40, dares to charge for its Web-based software — a recipe for disaster, according to TechCrunch40 organizer Michael Arrington. Right. If you consider half a billion dollars in annual revenues to be a disaster, that is.

I have never been more grateful to Jason Calacanis. The prickly Internet entrepreneur disinvited me, you see, from TechCrunch40, the conference opening today in San Francisco that he organized with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. And thereby saved me from a long nap at the Sheraton Palace. The conference was originally supposed to highlight 20 companies, but Arrington and Calacanis couldn't decide on just 20, so they "doubled down" and expanded the list to 40, ostensibly because all the companies were so great. But then we all saw the list last night. I'd considered jumping off my red-eye flight and heading to the Sheraton Palace — indeed, friends begged me to just show up and see what happened. But going by the list of startups presenting there — Zivity? Orgoo? — I'm just as content to get your reports and post the best of them.

Rapleaf is bragging that founder Auren Hoffman is an early signer of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. That blustering broadside, authored by Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, Macromedia founder Marc Canter, videoblogger Robert Scoble, and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, wants to set your online profiles and friends lists, trapped on sites like Facebook, free. The central tenet of the Bill? That individual users retain "ownership of their own personal information" and that users have the "freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites." Which could come in handy as people begin to question Rapleaf's scraping of profile data from social networks — data these networks claim to own and have exclusive rights to.

Want to get into TechCrunch20, the upcoming startup conference held by Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington? Are you "RELIABLE," between 5'7" and 5'9" and have "long hair and a petite frame?" This is could be your chance. According to an ad on Craigslist, two models are needed to work all day on September 18, the second day of TechCrunch20, doing promotions for a "media company" in San Francisco's "Financial District." Interested? Just send in your resume, headshot, and full body shot to techcrunchmodel@gmail.com. But which "media company" is it?

The crew from Uncov, the sarcastic self-styled anti-TechCrunch, wants to attend TechCrunch20. That, of course, is the conference where TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington will bless us with 20 demonstrations of the hottest new startups. Uncov's editors say they want to ask the hard questions we all suspect won't be posed to Arrington's handpicked favorites. But attendance, alas, isn't free. Each ticket costs $2,495. So the "bunch of poor startup founders who write a marginally popular blog that doesn't have any advertising on it" are having a hard time making ends meet. If you don't want Uncov absent at the TechCrunch20 "jerkoff," you can make a donation. So far, they have raised a whopping $185! So they need your support.

Okay, this is ridiculous. On what planet is the bikini-wearing readership of TechCrunch sufficient enough to warrant Federated Media serving up the above ad on its site? None, of course. Federated Media founder John Battelle emails us to point out that the bikini ad from DivaVillage.com and other gender benders displayed to the site's mostly male readers aren't a result of targeting gone awry, but simply the result of Federated Media serving up low-paying, untargeted "remnant" ads when it's not able to sell ads at full price. Battelle also notes that it's TechCrunch's decision, not Federated's, to accept those ads. So there you have it, TechCrunch readers: Michael Arrington, according to John Battelle, thinks you want to buy bikinis.

On Sand Hill Road, MILF stands for "mothers I'd like to fund." The mommy-blog frenzy among venture capitalists will likely be fueled by Johnson & Johnson's acquisition of Maya's Mom, a social network for mommies. Johnson & Johnson already owns advice site BabyCenter, making Maya's Mom a logical add-on. It would all be innocuous news if Maya's Mom was not swaddled in controversy, thanks to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's breathless writeups of Web 2.0 startups practically parody themselves. As does the incessant expansion of his "Crunch"-branded empire. But his overripe prose has met a near-perfect sendup in CrunchFood, a faux dot-comestibles blog written by a fake Michael Arrington. (Imagine that: a poser poseur.) CNNMoney's Jim Ledbetter writes, "Whoever is writing it has a seasoned grasp of Arrington's astonishing mixture of depth, conflicts of interest, timeliness, and hint of arrogance." A post about lemons and limes includes an obligatory disclosure about the fake Arrington's citrus-grove ownership. Whoever's behind it has a keen sense of irony. CNET, the tech publisher and particular Arrington bugaboo, has recently diversified into food writing. Given Arrington's knack for slavish imitation, could a real CrunchFood be so far off?

Those stunned by notorious East Coast nobody Julia Allison's infamous arrival on the Silicon Valley scene might be surprised to learn that she actually has a job. Apparently she writes columns for Time Out New York. About her sex life. And here's a shocker: Allison claims nerds make the best lovers. I know the identity of the geek who gave Allison what she writes is "the best sex I've ever had." But instead of just telling you, I'm going to let you guess, in the comments, who it is. Two hints: It's certainly not high-and-dry TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. And it's not, despite appearances, Jakob Lodwick, founder of IAC-controlled video site Vimeo. Unless his efforts over the weekend were particularly heroic. So who is the geek stud Allison had in mind? Leave your tawdry rumors in the comments. (Photo by Jakob Lodwick)

Through her Demo conference, Chris Shipley strands some of the most important people in tech together in the desert and forces them to pay attention to strange new ideas. It's like Burning Man without the playa dust and with much fancier drinks, or so I'm told. The experience is apparently scarring enough to bond people for life, judging by the palsy-walsy crowd of past Demo participants and guests who crowded into Palo Alto's Zibibbo restaurant Tuesday night to mingle and mix with other "alumni."

Blogs are, fundamentally, about writing in the now, embracing the 24-hour news cycle, and keeping everything up to date, right? Wrong. Not, that is, when you can dredge up an incident in the past, dress it up as news, and pawn it off on your readers to score points. This week, both TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg dug up old stories to relight the flame on old feuds.

Yesterday's post about former TechCrunch UK staffer Sam Sethi's decision to take Michael Arrington's TechCrunch head-on in covering American technology startups didn't capture the whole picture. Oliver Starr, global editor for mobile content, will cover mobile and tech issues for BlogNation USA. Oliver Starr is also an ex-employee of Michael Arrington, as a founding author of MobileCrunch, a sister site of TechCrunch focused on mobile computing.

Sam Sethi, a former blogger for the UK edition of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington's tech blog, had tried to keep things cordial with his former boss. The site he started, BlogNation, is the global equivalent of TechCrunch, but direct competition was avoided by not covering American startups. No longer. Sethi is taking the fight stateside with BlogNation USA. TechCrunch UK, meanwhile, remains defunct despite Arrington's planned June 1 relaunch.

Granted, I have no taste in music, either. But at least I have the good sense to hang my head in shame and not trumpet this fact, as Arrington's just done on TechCrunch, the tech blog he edits, in the course of writing about Apple's new My iTunes feature, which lets you broadcast your iTunes purchases on the Web. For the record, Arrington is into Gnarls Barkley, OutKast, Green Day, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers ... and the Pussycat Dolls. (I always wondered about Arrington.) I mean, for me, one of the best things about ripping my music library to iTunes was no longer having a rack of CDs on the wall for houseguests to peruse and mock. This new iTunes widget essentially restores that previous state of affairs, letting even perfect strangers lambaste your musical taste. Speaking of, after the jump, a detailed analysis of Arrington's musical misdeeds from Idolator editor Maura Johnston.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily. But a society of denial-ridden necrophiliacs hardly makes for a compelling audience. When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, it did everything imaginable to keep the brand alive — and everything imaginable to kill it. It forced the worst features of AOL onto Netscape and migrated the best features of Netscape to AOL — not that it helped either. And Jason Calacanis's brief tenure at AOL? That dirt-grubbing graverobber just made things worse, and then left for greener pastures.

I have a confession to make, folks. Remember that Julia Allison character, the New York-based TV commentator and magazine columnist who swept through town not long ago? Okay, yes, I'm technically gay and technically married, but the state nullified my marriage and Allison, more recently, nullified my gayness. We're totally going out. The apparent dalliances with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick? Just cover stories. Consider them Allison's beards. I'd post more but Julia's calling to me to reset her Wi-Fi connection. I don't have the heart to tell her I can't program my way out of a paper bag.