Interesting debate today — for a small period of time — BubbleGeneration’s Umair Haque leveled some interesting assertions at Mikey A et al. over at TechCrunch, and subsequently took the post down … but was then put up again, in response to it getting mirrored over at Crunchnotes.

His own assertions aren’t really that interesting to me (TC is plateauing, its ongoing growth is vested in the conflict of others, love >>> hate, koooooo-m-baya), but his other thoughts about taking TC on *is*. More specifically, that its a tough thing to do, because TC is a multi-headed monster, and incurring said wrath is like inviting a multi-layered dogpiled beating.

I mean, I don’t have anything particularly profound other than saying that I *agree* — somewhat.

First of all, Mike A et al. rarely single out or take on small minows and bottom feeder blogs (points to self). Secondly if he does, it is usually because its in reaction to a shit blogstorm that has occurred secondary to that.

Having said that, Umair’s got a point.

If you have a beef against what TC has written about you, there’s very little recourse.

Oh, sure … in *principle* having a blog means that you also have the potential platform to millions. But come now. If you’re reading *this* blog, you *aren’t*.

Fact is, if you want to rebut something Miky A has said about you or your business, there’s not much you can do to refute it, even if you have your own blog, particularly if that blog isn’t known, and you have no juice in the business.

Is it unfair? Of course it is.

But that’s the dynamics and economics of attention.

And you can substitute TechCrunch for “Perez Hilton”, if you want (although its a poor analogy: there’s no reason why he would write about you unless you were a minor celebrity involved in some stage of humiliating personal distress), or a larger publication that isn’t blog-like.

Of course what makes this challenging from a strictly blogging-centric point of view, is that blogs are usually fairly flat structures (particularly if its a single author blog) — and because of the personal nature that blogs often demand their authors to take, personal beefs can come out.

We can debate about whether or not such beefs actually *make* the target of the beef successful (or, more succesful, rather, than someone who is the object of praise — see PayPerPost … er, Aizea, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days) … but at the end of the day, attention is like any other commodity.

There is a natural scarcity of it, and some destinations have bucketloads of it, while others have none. Do stewards of that resource have to guard it carefully? Somewhat. Do they have an ethical obligation not to be royal douchebags? Of course.

But whether they are or not is immaterial, and much like gravity, the deathspiraling career of Britney Spears, and the inexplicable never-ending success of American Idol, these are things I take as givens now, and now worth wasting my time over the why’s and wherefore’s.

Mostly because I know that asking such questions, beating my chest, and woefully lamenting my poor lot in life (if I were ever the target of an injustice) {not that Umair *is* though} really accomplishes little.

Now, that’s not to say that as time turns and the wheels of change move on, sites like TC will not continue to lose their status as chief gorilla pimps of “new media”. I mean it might. But I don’t envision any one of us being agents of that change, necessarily, because of (another) nerd / blog / geek fight.

I think :)

In a Machiavellian way, he should get a big pat on the back (but being thoroughly schooled in Machiavellian transactions, he’d be watching closely for a knife as well).

Andy Beal summarizes it much better than I ever could, but this is the two second summary.

Fred Wilson, wealthy venture capitalist, decides to take a few bloggers (who were journalists at one time) to task about the breadth of their coverage. He admits that the companies that aren’t receiving pub are the ones that he has a direct connection to.

Mike Arrington decides to jump in with both fists (wrapped in tape, dunked in glue, covered with glass shards) to defend one of the bloggers who are on his staff, by deconstructing Fred’s arguments, and then proceeds level with some personal attacks by calling him out: hypocritical, wrong, and conflicted — which should be no surprise, because that’s exactly what the title of the post is.

What happens now?

A storm of blog / nerd controversy as all the feeder blogs chime in, and Techmeme temporarily pushes said story to the top (because Techcrunch is the gorilla pimp of all tech media, according to Techmeme, and scores almost 50% more on the juice scale than its next competitor, CNET — which would merely be, for example, a monkey pimp, small and suitable for grooming other gorilla pimps).

Mike’s said this more than once, and it bears linking to. When he writes controversial stuff, he wins.

I’ll repeat that.

When he write controversial stuff, he wins.

In fact, the MORE that a big blog writes controversial stuff, the more that they will will win, compared to any given competitor; factoring in the X-Factor, which is the meanness quotient, and it multiples their overall winness (or, pwnage, if you’re WOW/CS/Halo-inclined).

And that’s why when I read stuff like this, I read it with a grain of salt.

I mean, it doesn’t really matter so much what the facts are, so much that everyone’s watching now.

To wit:

Joe – we’ve found that the “hits” – the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion – are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens. Given that we are all rushing into new territory, I think a little leeway is appropriate.

Now, yes, its important to throw out the usual biscuit about blogger integrity, and so on, and so on. But the takeaway message is clearly this:

Engage your community. Don’t be afraid to get physical (in a metaphorical kind of way), and call people out. Don’t afraid to be negative. But be prepared to fight for your opinion.

And the bigger you are, the more effective it is (because people know about you). But even if you’re only a chimp-sized pimp (and not a Gorilla-sized one), its also effective, particularly if you call out a larger sized one and they actually respond.

{hint: it really works if what you’re saying has a ring of truth to some people}

I have nothing to say about this story around Digg / Mixx, except that as a community grows in size, the number of assholes who populate it will, of course grow in number as well; what was tight knit and collegial gives way to anonymous ass-hat-ery, and that’s just the nature of the web.

Now, this isn’t really saying anything against the Techmeme algorithm, and why it should choose *this* story to headline itself, and not say, the seemingly more “important” story by the San Francisco Chronicle detailing how iTunes is launching the careers of some would-be-unlikely musicians.

Nor, for example, is about Mike Arrington wanting to write this piece.

Its about how at the beginning of the day, there were, maybe two bloggers who had wrote about it, like new media law dude Rob Hyndman and Bloggers Blog.

Now, at the end of the day, we have quadrupled that number.

Why? Well, if there was something intrinsically interesting or newsworthy about Mike’s piece I might say “its because its intrinsically interesting or newsworthy”. But because it really *isn’t*, I am led to believe the *only* a big reason they’re writing about it is because it *is* the headlining news story.

That is, they want to comment on the most “newsiest” story of the day, or there’s a desire (subconscious or no), to have your blog attached to the headlining story.

[I now speak from personal experience on both feelings which can be oddly profound at times]

Irrespective of the actual reason, I think it shows in a funny way, how powerful Techmeme is. Sure, we all read it, and yes, this is a weekend, but depending on what the headlining story is, it can really influence what bloggers write about.

I mean, let’s move this story down to the bottom and let’s see how many of them — “us”, really — write about this non-event. I would probably say “not a lot” and that’s being charitable.

As an aside, and I don’t know if there’s any way to prove this, but this also proves to be an interesting case example of how powerful Techmeme is relative to other aggregators. This fairly soft story is *also* headlining Megite, for example, *and* the Tech section of Blogrunner. Not having followed on the other aggregators, I do wonder if what happened was this story being fairly innocuous, hitting the Top of Techmeme, having other bloggers link to it, and then propelling the story to the top of other news aggregators.

Bottom line? Techmeme is our beloved aggregator, but for tech bloggers anyway, I think perhaps, that it has an inordinate amount of power. Or, rather, if its merely natural (as the most beloved of tech aggregators), then perhaps I never really appreciated how much power it had over us to begin with.

Over at TechCrunch a guest poster, Dan Acker Greenburg, has revealed how the company he works for creates viral videos on YouTube. Go and read the details, but it basically boils down to marketing tricks, and less to do with the content itself.

Wait — that doesn’t do it justice.

It basically boils down to manipulating structures within a social system to promote videos that are seemingly popular through an organic (i.e. “real”) sense of popularity.

Wait — that doesn’t really do it justice, either.

What it *really* boils down to is creating multiple puppet accounts, creating fake controversy to pump up the pageviews, and under-the-table renting of popular bloggers opinions on given videos, and / or the bribery of certain email list owners to pimp said videos.

Yeah, that’s about it.

Right now, the post is absolutely burning up TechCrunch with almost 200 comments, and you can bet there will probably be more. Mike Arrington himself seems a bit taken aback by how honest the post is, but is anyone *really* shocked?

Are your (or anyone’s) sensibilities *really* that delicate?

I mean, its been a year now since the Edelman Wal-Mart fake-blogger fiasco. And around the same time I was posting / ranting regularly about how Digg might or might not be manipulated.

In fact, one of my last thoughts on the topic was that the best marketers are going to be gaming Digg in a way that is not visible to most people; that Jay Adelson’s rhetoric about not having any submissions being manipulated were total hubris as well.

Bottom line is that this post pulls the curtain back on a phenomenon that any rational thinking individual would already suspect.

That is, when there is financial incentive and opportunity to game a system — even when that system has the appearance of being “open”, “transparent”, and built upon the goodwill and trust of its users (how typically quaint!) — someone will do it.

And the best of them will do it in such a way that no one else will even *know*.

At times like this I almost feel bad for Ted Murphy, one of the guys behind PayPerPost. Not just because I met him and he seems like a nice guy. But rather that he tried to build a business that was attempting to do something in a fairly open and transparent way, and with the new Google PageRank adjustment is getting burned for it.

Whereas guys like Dan Greenburg? They’re paying bloggers and list owners under the table where Google will _never_, *ever* be able to tell, and they’re making out like bandits. And that’s besides the practice of creating puppet accounts to pimp their “viral” marketing tactics.

Again, am I surprised and shocked? Not really.

But I think we should all take anything that seems viral and organic with a grain of salt these days. Because no matter how “real” something popular seems, there just might be a marketing or PR firm behind it.

There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about it (but, really, mostly bad), but clearly in an age of “social media” and “user generated” content, there’s a strong case to be made for new media literacy.

And guys like Dan Greenburg, and this post in particular, need to be made case example number one.

We’ve got Mike’s own take on things, and for a more complete version of things head over to Rick Calvert’s blog at BlogExpo wherein he goes into the gory details, and a mea culpa culminating in some calendar confusion.

I think I’ve learned a seemingly self-evident things from this debacle.

1. Mike Arrington is the blogger everyone loves to hate – but perhaps its human to both love and loathe those who are at the of the pyramid, not requiring much at all to go from one to the other kind of emotion.

2. Bloggers love their blogging dramas – hey, I know I do.  Its kind of lame, but here I am writing about it right now at 2am.  Go figure.

One thing I *don’t* understand, though.  Why did Leo Laporte say that Mike “forgot” about coming to BlogExpo, when it clearly wasn’t a case of remembering at all?  I suspect that we may never actually know, unless someone puts a bit of a match to his feet.

In a bit of blogging-centric news, TechCrunch has recently hired Erick Schonfeld as its co-editor, Mr. Schonfeld being the former editor of the late Business 2.0 magazine. It does beg the question with the hiring earlier this year of Heather Harde, who was then the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive, how “mainstream” TechCrunch is really getting — and perhaps more to the point, if TechCrunch is really still a “blog”.

I think the answer is still a definite “yes”, as in my mind as TechCrunch still sticks to a blogging structure in the way it organizes its news and commentary — with a reverse chronological order, comments, feeds and so on.

But will TechCrunch still maintain the spirit of a blog over time? Highly opinioned, shooting from the hip, breaking-the-news-first-everything-else-be-damned, still acknowledging and participating in the blogosphere (and not be above it), pull-no-punches kind of spirit?

Hey, I hope so.

Clearly, however, as TechCrunch continues to grow and solidify itself as amongst the super-tiered blogs, it has in its own right become a mini-media empire. Its responsible to its readers, its reputation, and just as importantly, its sponsors and advertisers.

And over time, I think its natural for complacency and inertia to set in, to find safety in the absence of risk, and above all, avoid biting the hand that feeds you.

I have no idea if this is what’s in store for a super-blog like TechCrunch, but watching things evolve is proving to be a fascinating case study in how a new media giant has grown and evolved. And I think it remains to be seen if it falls to the same kind of content and editorial doldrums as it becomes increasingly perceived *as* the “mainstream” publication for “web2.0″ news.

So I’m a tech blogger of the new media persuasion. And there’s a conference that many new media bloggers are going to — perhaps you’ve heard of the one Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis is putting together, TechCrunch 40.

Now, I’m *not* going to TechCrunch 40. Its not because I don’t want to (because I’d love to see what Hammer has to say about new media). Its because of a lot of things really. I can’t get time off my day job as a medical resident. My parents and my wife’s parents are out of town, so no babysitting help for my wife. Flights to SF aren’t cheap. And so on.

Translation? I don’t really do *this* (points to blog) as a living — as a sole thing that I do.

So, does not flying across the country to go to a tech conference where “major” tech bloggers are going … does that not make me a “real” blogger? I mean, if we use Jason Calacanis’s recipe for being an A-list blogger, going to a couple conferences a month (actually the original post says “per week”)Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and not me is part of the prescription, right?

Clearly then (at the risk of dredging up that horrible blog convo that won’t go away) I’m not an A-list blogger, but does not going to major conferences not make me a “real” blogger?

I don’t really know the answer to this, except that I used to think that whatever notion of the “kind” of blogger I am rests in the perceptions of you — my readers. And while its true, we are judged by the content of our posts, its *also* true that the promotion of your blog is an equally important activity.

And the promotion and marketing of one’s blog is often determined by how many people you know, and how well they know you; and its only made a whole lot easier and more powerful when those connections are made in person.

I’ve been blessed with being able to meet some pretty interesting and relatively important blogging folks in my time blogging. And I don’t know where this blog would have been without those relationships.

But if you never met any people “live” though, and made all of your relationships virtually — well, *could* you, and still be regarded a “real” blogger? I suspect the answer is a hearty “yes”, albeit that its probably harder.

Harder to make connections, harder to really report on what’s actually happening, harder to convince people about who you are, and harder to make who you are memorable. Because all you’ll really have is your writing, and your ability to connect online.

Which, I suppose, is what we all started with, and are eventually, judged upon.