I'll be sad if Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington ever figures out what all those tedious journalism-school terms like off the record and deep background actually mean. Because I hate the way tech people act as if Arrington and other established writers work for them. They see journalists as outsourced copywriters, under specific orders what and what not to write. Yesterday Arrington blogged, "We got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record .. . this person confirmed that [MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson] is really '36 or 37' and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet." He was promptly chewed out by a member of the Valley's most know-it-all caste: a software engineer.

This weekend's San Francisco Chronicle article on how blogging is a viable business has curious timing. It's either a year too late, or years too early. Hard to tell. Like past blogging-for-bucks articles the writer has clearly read, it focuses mainly on TechCrunch, though Valleywag parent Gawker Media, Daily Kos, and PopSugar make appearances. The takeaway: blog kingpin Michael Arrington and his TechCrunch mini-empire make more money than you.

I hate watching people suck up to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. But I enjoy watching Arrington, a law-trained entrepreneur before he began posting in 2005, learn the ropes of reporting as he goes. Last night, News Corp. media overlord Rupert Murdoch's publicist circulated an advance notice to reporters. It detailed Murdoch's planned onstage announcement that night with MySpace head Chris DeWolfe at the Web 2.0 conference. Arrington did what career newsmen do: He wrote the story ahead of time. He published it as soon as Murdoch and DeWolfe took the stage. Arrington's post falsely claimed the pair had "announced some of their plans during a Q&A with John Battelle" for about 15 minutes before it actually happened. Still, TechCrunch wins! And Arrington has once again accidentally exposed another behind-the-scenes game that delivers fake "breaking news" to trusting audiences. I'm sure journalists and bloggers will lecture TechCrunch today. They're really saying: Damn, that scoop should've been mine. (Photo: TechCrunch)

Ego-blogger Robert Scoble,TechCrunch proprietor Michael Arrington, and others along with many of their followers whiled away the weekend manually tallying up RSS-feed subscriber numbers via Google's Reader application for popular blogs. Why?

"The whole scene is like a little league game where everyone's a winner and everyone gets a trophy at the end. You've got people like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble who are the coaches of the team and handing out the trophies, and then Uncov is like the creepy guy in the trench coat sitting in the stands." — Startupper Ted Dziuba tells Wired why his nasty little blog kicks the collective asses of the TechCrunch crowd. [Wired]

We hear that writers for CrunchGear, the gadgets blog run by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, have had their pay cut by more than half, from $25 a post to $12 $3,000 a month to $1,500. One wonders: Has Arrington simply found that he can get away with paying bloggers less? Or, in cutting his writers' wages, is he tacitly admitting that his efforts to expand his empire — from the niche of covering Web startups to the more popular subjects of cell phones and digital cameras — haven't been successful? Update: We also hear a writer was fired from MobileCrunch, told that the wireless-focused site was on the verge of getting shut down. And now we've heard from CrunchGear and MobileCrunch editor John Biggs. His comments, after the jump.

Why is Apple's advertising so successful? Because, one could argue, it doesn't let its engineers design its advertising. Apple is running new iPhone ads which apparently puzzle nerdly sorts like TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. The ads feature "regular people" talking about how their lives have been improved by the iPhone. Of the three ads, the phone itself makes just one two-second appearance, when a businessman touts its "visual voicemail" feature. The rest of the time, it's just some guy telling a story about how the iPhone makes his life better. Arrington doesn't like the ads, asking "where's the phone?" Michael, don't quit your day job. These ads are brilliant. After the jump, an analysis of why — and a clip so you can judge for yourself.

Henry Blodget is having raucous fun. On his blog, Silicon Alley Insider, the "disgraced stock analyst" — a seemingly requisite epithet whenever Blodget is mentioned — is driving people crazy. How? By, say, actually running the numbers on how Google might one day be worth $2,000. Or riffing off a ludicrously sketchy thumbsucker about what blogs are worth, in which he questions whether TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. Even the tech blog's editor, Michael Arrington, linked to it, laughing all the while. Unfortunately, no one let Light Reading's Scott Raynovich in on the joke. Raynovich stoutly debunks the notion that TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. An effort, of course, which I'd applaud, if I thought anyone, Blodget included, believed the notion in the first place. (Photo by Getty Images)

One could say many things about blog-tracker Technorati and its founder, David Sifry, but the worst charge, I think, to make, is that he helped popularize a delusion particularly congenial to the self-involved world of the Valley: That links to your website somehow matter more than traffic. A newly hired CEO may fix the business, but he's unlikely to repair the damage that idea has wrought. Now, Techmeme has launched a similar tracking service, the Techmeme Leaderboard, that will surely make things worse.

Removed from his Bay Area fanbase, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington speaks to a mostly empty room at the DigitalLife convention. Valley fame, it seems, does not travel well. [News.com]

Techdirt, the ever-opinionated analysis blog, has weighed in and found Demo's lineup of startups and new products more compelling than last week's TechCrunch40. Why? Mike Masnick doesn't come out and say it, but his implication is clear: Unlike the parade of Web 2.0 one-note-Johnnies drummed up by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, most of experienced Demo organizer Chris Shipley's picks were focused on useful improvements to existing technology, not gimmicky new ideas. Arrington and Calacanis launched TechCrunch40 because they felt that it was somehow wrong for conferences to charge startups to present. Nonsense, of course. I think that the fact that Demo charges presenters — reportedly $18,500 apiece — was actually what makes it a stronger event.

We hear there were actually two companies who chose to forgo this week's Demo conference and present at Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington's TechCrunch40 conference instead. The startups in question? Media-sharing service Wixi has confirmed that they will not be presenting at Demo, and we hear that avatar service mEgo is also off the list. (Two flacks for mEgo didn'tt return our call from this morning and sent us straight to voicemail when we followed up a few minutes ago.) Both companies presented onstage during Tuesday afternoon's "Rich media and mashups" section. If Demo followed its usual cancellation policies, these companies would seem to have lost their $18,000 entrance fees. (Representatives for Wixi had no comment on the fee.) We hope these two companies were able to get a worthwhile experience from TechCrunch40. They may not have won the $50,000 grand prize, but they learned something about the value of a contract.

We hear that Chris Shipley and the rest of the Demo conference team are coming down hard on companies who violate their exclusive contract. A tipster "has it on on good authority" that one presenting company has been "yanked off the stage" at tomorrow's fall Demo conference in San Diego, because it demo'd its wares at Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis's competing TechCrunch40 conference last week. No surprise there: The whole point of these startup-demonstration conferences is to show something new, and an already-launched product won't make the cut. But Shipley's crew is being especially tough: We hear that the company isn't gettting its $18,000 entrance fee back either. So who is the culprit? And did they make the main stage, or did they lose out on Demo just for debuting in TechCrunch40's also-ran DemoPit? If you know anything more, fill us in.

TechCrunch and Business 2.0 never managed to merge, but editor Michael Arrington has snapped up former B2 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld. (This explains why Schonfeld recently revived his dormant blog to cover the TechCrunch40 conference.) Opinionated, arrogant, and whip-smart, Schonfeld is the perfect match for Arrington. We're looking forward to the fireworks at TechCrunch edit meetings — to which Schonfeld will be dialing in remotely from Brooklyn. [Bits]

Did Business 2.0 die a natural death? Or was it murdered? The story told so far about the tech-focused, San Francisco-based magazine's demise was an abrupt drop in advertising. But in his MediaShift column, Mark Glaser suggests that a poorly planned business-side reorganization by its parent company, Time Inc., is more to blame. Combining Business 2.0's salesforce with that of Fortune and Money led not to the expected boost in ads, but a drop that hit all the magazines, with Business 2.0 — where, I should disclose, I worked before joining Valleywag — the most vulnerable. The most intriguing tidbit: Glaser reports that TechCrunch, run by Michael Arrington, explored a merger with Business 2.0. Arrington, in a blog post, confirms the rumor, and, intriguingly, suggests that Time Inc. was "proactive in destroying" the magazine to favor Fortune.

Congratulations to entrepreneur Aaron Patzer, pictured above with an oversized novelty check. His financial-services startup Mint was the big winner in this week's TechCrunch40 conference, bringing home the $50,000 prize for being the "best in show." So, what was the overall view of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis's big event? This take, sent to us late last night from an out-of-town journalist, explains it better than we could.

My fellow Valleywaggers Owen Thomas and Nick Douglas were banned from the TechCrunch40 conference, and, odds are, I would have been banned from the afterparty at Fluid nightclub, had I asked permission to attend. So, I didn't bother asking, and scrounged up a ticket though back-channel connections, instead. Specifically, through the generosity of my new crush, the mysterious "TechCrunch40" Twitter guy, who left an envelope with an extra ticket and a cryptic note with the bartender at the House of Shields around the corner from Fluid. (Turns out "TechCrunch40" is a group effort — the note was signed by Rick Diculous, El Guapo, Mr. Gray, and Harvey Farquard.)

Only the more grizzled members of San Francisco's press corp even remember Comdex. The once-legendary — and infamous — tech expo was hot well into the '90s, but it rapidly fell to pieces as it overexpanded. As desperate gadget hawkers tried to lure attendees to see their wares, they hired comely "booth babes" to staff their exhibits. TechCrunch40, the Web 2.0 startup conference organized by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, is infinitely smaller than Comdex ever was. But the comparison is still apt. Bypassing Comdex's successful years, TechCrunch40 is going straight for the seedy, desperate late stage of Comdex, as these two short-shorts-wearing publicity-mongers prove. (Photo by Myles Weissleder)

ProfileBuilder is a sponsor of TechCrunch40, the startup conference organized by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. It's also the subject of a glowing, "exclusive" writeup in TechCrunch today. Coincidence? I'll let you decide. The writeup celebrates ProfileBuilder's acquisition of ZingFu. Say who buys say whom? Exactly. These are companies you're unlikely to need to care about, ever. Except to note this: The friendly TechCrunch article doesn't mention ZingFu's nasty habit of nicking copyrighted images, like this photo of Arrington by Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale, with no fair-use rationale in sight.

Prickly TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is given to griping about PR people and their capricious rules. But he's not above setting his own rules when it comes to his TechCrunch40 conference. Specifically, presenting companies have been required to observe a press embargo until their turn on stage, and violators may be yanked from the lineup. With only 10 companies left to go, it seems like most of the startups have been sheepishly obedient to this rule. Anyone get yanked? Let us know. The full rules and regulations after the jump.