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The blogging bitch-slap-fest continues
Not content to let the gigantic egos of Jason Calacanis (ex of Netscape) and Nick Denton (former and current editor of Valleywag) battle it out alone, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington decided to wade into the fray with a post on the recent back-and-forth posts by J.C. and N.D. For what it’s worth, Mikey seems to be siding with Jason rather than Nick.
As my friend Rob Hyndman points out, this is all very High School 2.0. And it’s obvious from reading the comments at TechCrunch that even some fans of Mike’s think talking about the bitchy posts by Denton and Calacanis is beneath him. “I thought this was TechCrunch, not DaysOfOurLivesCrunch,” says one. Another suggested the post belonged on Mike’s personal blog, CrunchNotes, “if that.”
As I said in the comments on Rob’s post, blogs and social media are inherently more personal and more interactive than traditional media — and that personalized nature comes through in many ways. It’s true that you would never see that sort of behaviour in the “old” media (apart from the gossip columns), but that’s because old media is by its nature more impersonal. With a more personalized media, you have to take the good with the bad.
The Scobleizer says that we need both Valleywag to tear things down and TechCrunch to build things up, and then reaches for a somewhat bizarre geological metaphor, with Mike Arrington as the famous Yosemite landmark El Capitan and Jason Calacanis Nick Denton as (I think) a glacier. He’s right though. For better or worse, both TechCrunch and Valleywag have their purposes.
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Correction: Nick Denton is the glacier. I’m not sure of the role Jason plays between TechCrunch and Valleywag, though. Gotta think about that!
As I noted in a follow-up, maybe we need to see is Nick launch ValleyCrunch, a biz site, and Mike to launch CrunchBuzz - a gossip site.
Oops. Thanks, Robert. It was hard to keep all the players and their various geological formations straight :-) Maybe Jason could be the Yosemite river? Water chips away at everything in its path, finds its own level… I think we’re onto something.
Let the metaphors roll. May I please me the little broken pinecomb washed up in the river bank?
You totally can, Amyloo. And I would like to be a rattler down in a gulley somewhere, or maybe a Gila monster :-)
[...] The blogging bitch-slap-fest continues » Mathew Ingram: mathewingram.com/work [...]
I wonder what’s the best way to say, “Valleywag needs to grow a set and talk some real shit and TechCrunch needs to expand beyond hippies making software that will be acquired, vaporized or forgotten and repeated in 3.4 years.”
Oh well hm, nevermind. /smirk