I must say, I'm glad that there's a negative reaction to TechCrunch being stirred up. It's an utterly dull website, peddling uninteresting stories about Web 2.0. I unsubscribed about a year ago, and I don't miss it at all. I was very pleased to see IsMikeArringtonADick.com surface on the Twittersphere yesterday. The problem isn't actually Arrington, it's the fact that he is the de facto King of the new Web, which means everything becomes about him, and he's not a good gatekeeper. Add Ajax to a turd and he'll rave about it, while really interesting stuff like Fire Eagle will just whiz past him. Similarly, Arrington is very much against SXSW, calling it a pathetic excuse for a conference. Funny that. Personally, I much prefer reading what the SXSW-attending crowd have to say than the Web 2.0 Expo crowd - mostly due to the fact that the good ideas and hard work that goes on behind the scenes are done by the sort of people who go to SXSW while the incestuous VCism goes on at Web 2.0, and the fact that designers and developers - the core SXSW market - tend to talk in plain English, call things by their real name and not bullshit, habits which the Web 2.0 Expo types could learn from.
Reporting on Web 2.0 and startups is barely even necessary anymore. I don't need a reporter to tell me what Twitter or Facebook or Google are doing - they're on the fucking Internet! They have blogs, and I can read. This is not Iraq - I can see for myself. If this is the decline and fall of TechCrunch, bring it on. As web 2.0 winds down, perhaps it's time that TechCrunch winds down with it.
