How to Get into TechCrunch

Engagement at Web 2.0, right? Yeah. So this is Michael Erick. Michael, I'll let you introduce yourself. You're a big boy.

All right. Oh, yeah, our mics are on. Is your mic on? I don't know. I think just mine is, which is perfect. Hi, everyone, My name is Mike Arrington. I'm a former lawyer, former entrepreneur, actually. I'm still an entrepreneur, but mostly what I do now is I write a blog called TechCrunch that is about a year old. It started off as a hobby. I was starting a new company last year called Edge IO with a co founder, and I had been out of sort of technology for about a year because I took a year off to hang out in LA and do absolutely nothing. And so starting a new company, I realized a lot of cool stuff had happened. I didn't know about Flickr and log lines and all this stuff, so I realized I needed to get up to speed really quickly on it, and blogs were clearly the best way to do that. And so I started reading all these blogs. But I realized that even though I was reading three or four hundred blogs, there was no one blog at the time that just talked about startups. So I started TechCrunch as a hobby. It's grown from there to become a bit of a business. And we have, I think, five blogs now, and we have a job board, and we have some other things. I have 10 people working with me, and we're a small startup ourselves now, so that's it.

Okay, so how many of you read or subscribe? Subscribe to via feed. TechCrunch.

That's good.

Okay, so I think, is this on? Well, you know, a good sound man would have turned it on. Okay, how about now? Windows Mobile? So I guess the first question.

I'd like to take a jab at Microsoft.

No, not at all.

While we're at Microsoft campus.

So the first question I have, and it's the question that is probably on everybody's mind, is this is an audience of entrepreneurs and they've heard these stories that if you get on TechCrunch, your servers get crushed, you get half a million uniques in the next two hours. And they think that being on TechCrunch can launch their company, their product or service. So I guess the most salient question I can ask to start is how does an entrepreneur get his product or company on TechCrunch?

We have. Well, there's. I have a real answer and I have the answer. I'm supposed to say the answer. I'm Supposed to say is we have like, we have channels to do that. My email is editorechcrunch. That is my actual email address. It's the one that everyone uses. I have no secret email address. It's on the about page of TechCrunch. We have a company submission form on TechCrunch. And also a lot of companies come in through that and I would say that we get a lot of leads. Probably half of the write ups we do are from cold calls coming in through the, through the email or through the site. But really the really interesting stuff for us is stuff that comes in through referrals. And so I know a lot of entrepreneurs, I know a lot of you in this room right now. And if I know you and somebody comes in through you, it can help me sort of vet it and make sure it's something that we want to write about. Know a lot of VCs and if a VC is already interested in a business, there's a good chance that we're going to write about it. But you know, it's the same as always. A lot of it is relationships and if you know somebody that can sort of speak on your behalf, it's always going to be easier for you I think to get to any blogger.

How many pitches for coverage come in to you per day that are not a referral? So just dear editor?

30.

30. And how many come in via referral?

10.

So 40. And how many companies do you write about per day?

Three to four.

So 10%.

Yeah, but you know, it's not just, it's not really, it's not even close to 10% because of those three to four, you know, half of those write ups are going to be either going back and seeing another startup like we wrote about like.com today, which is a new launch of Ria or talking about a Google or Microsoft product. So really it's more like maybe one a day or one every other day where we'll talk about a brand new startup.

Okay. So mechanistically these people write into editor or they have someone who knows you write in for them. What makes a pitch pop that makes you want to write about it versus the 15th social networking, bookmarking, Web 2.0 piece of crap.

Right. So I think you're just.

You know, that other, the other 29.

Well, so it's not, I mean really it's how good the company is, it's not how good your pitch is. So you know, I've had, I've had 17 year old guys write to Me. And they have no idea how to sort of pitch somebody. But within a couple of seconds, I realize they're onto something really, really cool. A group of college students created a company called Amy Street. It's Amie, and it's actually a really innovative way to get new indie music out into the market. It's a really cool business model. And they just sort of said, hey, we launched, and will you look at this? And I did. And within seconds, I knew it was the right thing. But I'll say this, I'm probably not. Or my analyst who goes through a lot of this is probably not going to be able to get through the first, you know, more than the first couple of sentences of your email. And if the first couple of sentences are, you've used the word revolutionary or huge or something like that, it's probably going to be tossed. And we do actually miss good companies because of such poor pitches. And so within one or two or three sentences, you need to get across, you know exactly what it is your business does. And the best way to do that, even though you hate it, is to talk about it in terms of another company. So if, you know, if you are doing something with Flash video, talk about how it's different than YouTube. I know the last thing you want to do is talk about YouTube, but give us a frame of reference and it's going to help us understand it.

So you sort of said that revolutionary is a bad word. Can you give us any other words that are flags that says that you. You're clueless, so it's a crappy company.

Well, or that some PR person or marketing person wrote it. You know, I think, you know, Nick's here, who occasionally writes for TechCrunch, is an entrepreneur himself. Nick, what other words do we see? Revolutionary is the one that gets me.

Change the way you use the Internet.

Yes, change.

So change the way. This is what not to do. Right. So, Pat, revolutionary. Change the way they use their Internet. What else I'll bring about now?

How about disrupted?

Disruptive.

Yeah, disruptive. Who said that? Five points. Yeah, disruptive is another good one. And, you know, don't. You know, it's. And actually I work with my writers on this as well. Using what I call cheap adjectives is not a good. It's not good when you're writing or when you're promoting what you're doing. You need to get like, you know, disruptive or interesting or revolutionary. It doesn't tell the reader anything and you've just wasted a word. So get right to the point, let us flower it up and tell the story if we like it, but just get right to the point. And you should do that with everyone. When you meet with VCs, they hear the same thing. When you hear something, you hear these words over and over again, you just start to tune out. And once you've tuned out, it's over.

Are you tuning out to anything that says it's Web 2.0?

Yeah, I think. Yeah. Well, we're in a. So 2005 was a really good year for me because it was before anyone really knew about TechCrunch and I was really out hunting for startups. They weren't coming to me and I'd find good stuff and I'd write about it and no one was bugging me. And I was able to just write, which is what I really love to do, is just sit for five hours and do nothing but write. I used to fly to Europe on SAS and they had Internet access and it was the greatest thing in the world. Like sit on those flights and just write for like five hours straight. And now it's.

What kind of battery were you using?

Well, you can plug in. So that's the thing. But now there's so many companies starting and there's so many me too. Companies that aren't. Maybe they're good companies, they're not necessarily interesting from a TechCrunch reader point of view. They don't want to see the next delicious clone that we're just missing good companies that we want to write about. Because of so much noise, the signal to noise ratio has gone off the deep end.

What is the effect of being on TechCrunch? Have you heard from entrepreneurs?

I was talking to an entrepreneur, SlideShare this morning and she can actually speak to what happened? How did it go when we wrote about SlideShare? Were we the first to write about it?

Yes, we were the first to write about it.

SlideShare, by the way, is really cool.

Revolutionary Web 2.0.

And she wouldn't say that.

User generated content, long tail product.

I actually cut her off on the phone and we just met today for the first time. I remember you were telling me all this stuff and I said, oh, it's YouTube for PowerPoint. And that's what it is. You take a PowerPoint presentation, you upload it and it cuts it down into individual slides in flash and presents it. And that way you don't have to email something to somebody, you just send the VC, the link to the PowerPoint and it's really really cool. So anyway, how did it go?

We were really afraid to use the word YouTube. But since.

Wait, come up here so everybody can hear. Come on now. There's a handheld on the end.

Oh.

So I guess the biggest surprise was we didn't know what a big readership you had in Latin America. So from day one, Seriously.

And among the, you know, you didn't know either? We do.

I have no idea.

But I mean, from day one and among Christians. Turn the mic on. So I don't have numbers because we launched and we didn't have even stats packages in place. We just kind of launched. But it was huge. I mean, right from day one, which was an invite only site, and we had just thousands of people just queuing to sign up and we literally could not get them through the doors fast enough. And what was amazing to me was that it was really not just the web 2.0 ish crowd that we had expected. It was really people from all the world over immediately, from the first minute, I would say. And it was people from not just the Silicon Valley crowd. I mean, we have a big user group of people using SlideShare for sermons right from day one, the first, you know, first two hours. For sermons. Yes, people do sermons in PowerPoint. We had no idea.

You know, God has a 30% market share.

How often do you use that line? That's a good line.

I'm full of good lines.

I would say the biggest thing is that Michael really has a broad reach. It's not just a big reach, it's a broad reach into all sorts of users. And if your service is truly interesting to them, they'll find you through him. So we'd expected that if you would write about us, we'd get the web 2.0 ish crowd. It was much broader than that.

And how long did this techcrunch effect last?

Well, for us it's lasted.

I mean, how many days has it been?

Yeah, but that's not normal. So for them, I think there's traffic. We were saying it's sort of historically, but normally you see the spike and it's just the stickiness. How much of the spaghetti sticks to the wall, I think, is based on how good your product is.

Do we have any more TechCrunch believers who want to testify about what a.

Great.

Thing it is at this point? Can you sort of explain the totality of what TechCrunch is? Because it's multiple blogs, It's.

What is it? Well, the big idea is, I think I'm a Big fan of CNET News, which does about 15 million page views a month, and know a lot of the guys over there, but CNET's pretty good. It's better than the New York Times for getting tech news, I think, and I think most people would agree. They have very talented, knowledgeable writers, but they're not very fast because they still have to go through an editor and they still have to go through a process to get something published. And they don't do a good job of embracing the other amazing people out there who are are writing on the same topics as they are, so they don't leak out quite very much. So I want to beat CNET at what they're doing. I want to break news faster than them, which I think we do already sometimes, and I'd like to have more page views than them in the next year. And so what we're doing is TechCrunch is focused just on startups, and it will continue to do that. And it's the biggest blog right now, but hopefully in six months it won't be the biggest blog in our family. We've launched a site called CrunchGear, which is focused just on gadgets. It's already, I think, a third or a fourth of the size of TechCrunch in terms of traffic. Just a much wider audience, I think, is interested in the new ipod rather than the next YouTube for PowerPoint, which is what I love. But still more people are going to care about the ipod. So we're launching into MobileCrunch, enterprise video gaming. We're doing all kinds of things like that. We want to sort of capture the spectrum of technology and then wrap that up into something that we think can beat CNET at their own game. With professional journalists writing, but not going through an editor writing what they feel at the time, mixing in facts, but also giving their opinion at the same time, which journalists are often afraid to do. And I think we can do something pretty interesting.

Couldn't you. How many of you have been to demo? See, this is the people who paid ten grand. Does everybody know what demo is? So demo is a show where you go and you get invited and then you pay a lot of money and you get to demo your new product or service to a crowd of four or five hundred VCs, experts, wannabes, you know, whatever. So couldn't you get into the conference business? Couldn't you be in the demo business?

Yeah, but let me answer a different question, which is I never understood. We just yesterday got through watching Launchpad at Web 2.0. So I won't just pick on demo, but companies go to demo and they pay nearly $20,000. You can get a little bit of a discount, but you pay nearly $20,000 to talk to 800 people, 99% of which aren't going to try your product, aren't even paying attention or in the room when you're giving the demo and you've just spent maybe your entire marketing budget for the year if you're a startup. Yesterday we saw 13 companies present at Launchpad. They paid. Nick, how much did they pay?

10 grand.

10 grand? To be in front of a few hundred people. I think it's a waste of money. I mean, if you're a young startup, I think it's a complete waste of money. And my friends run these conferences and they're not going to want me to say this, but I say it's. My advice is don't spend your money doing that. Spend your money. Well, first of all, don't spend the money at all. If your product is really good, talk to a few bloggers to start. And not just bloggers, there's guys like Rafe Needleman who writes for cnet. He's a full on journalist that has the CNET audience and he's just as accessible as I am. Talk to these guys and get them to write about it. You get a third party to write about it, it doesn't cost you anything and you get in front of hundreds of thousands of people instead of 800 people. So yes, we could get into the business, but I don't believe in it. I don't think it's the right thing.

But relative to the old, old way, the old old way would be to $2 million advertising. So we went from $2 million advertising to spending 50 grand to go to demo. You thought you were really smart, right? So now you're saying send one email to Mike Arrington and you've accomplished that. So we've gone from 2 million to 50,000 to Z.

My second favorite sort of marketing writer is Seth Godin.

Okay.

You know who my first favorite is?

Who?

Come on, man.

Oh yeah, right. Don't stop, don't stop.

And he writes, how come you don't.

Blog about me then I could use some links.

Every time I disagree with you, I've linked to you.

So you don't disagree enough.

No, come on. But Seth talks about the purple cow. And at least for Internet startups, I'm a true believer in this. If you're not building something that's going to market itself, it's going to be really, really tough no matter what you're building. If it's not going to be. If you have to spend, spend a couple million bucks or even 50 grand to get the word out there, that's not going to jumpstart things. If your product is going to work, it's going to work without you spending a dime. And there's just so many examples of that happening. I think anybody wanting to create a new startup for the web should really. I just would not be putting resources into marketing.

I really would. So would you say that too much money is worse than too little?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We've never raised money for TechCrunch because I think once you raise it, that's what I assume you're talking about is raising too much money.

Yes.

Yeah. You spend it. Also, when I spend money for TechCrunch, it's money we've earned, we've put up advertising and I spend it very carefully. I've been involved in venture backed startups, I've run them. And I'll tell you that even though you think you're being careful with the money, you're never as careful as you are with money you've actually earned in revenue yourself. So if you can get away with not raising money, then I would definitely say don't raise any money.

What? To the extent that you're comfortable. Can you tell us some of your metrics, some of the page views, uniques, revenue, whatever. That's.

Yeah. So some of this was in the Wall Street Journal last week and some of it I didn't say, but it's now public, so I'm happy to sort of repeat it.

It's sounding like Donald Rumsfeld here, but. And you know what happened to him?

Well, that article is funny. They called, they asked me, they said, we're thinking about writing an article about you. Can you tell some people to call? And I gave him some very careful references.

Your mom, your dad.

Suddenly guys that I knew eight years ago were calling me saying, the Wall Street Journal called me today and was asking about that time you got arrested for this. And it's like, what? So some really funny stuff came out in the article that I've taken some heat for, but TechCrunch is doing. We've done as many as half a million pages in a day. We're doing 70, 80, 90, 100,000 pages a day on average. Now the other blogs probably are about maybe 50, 60,000 combined. I think our revenues are 120, 130amonth now. And most of that's profit, which we're using basically to seed fund ourselves. And I'm going to use that money to start hiring some really talented people in the next couple of months. And really, like I said, go after CNET because, you know, TechCrunch is a business, too. And in a year, I'd like to have people like my parents know what TechCrunch is, just like they know what CNET is, as opposed to just entrepreneurs.

Your parents know what CNET?

Sure, yeah.

So you're making 100, 120 grand a month. Is it advertising? Sponsorship?

What is it mostly advertising. We have a job board that does very well as well, and then we have parties every couple of months.

How much does it cost to advertise a job on the TechCrunch?

$200.

And how long does that listing last?

30 days. But the first few days are what matter.

Okay.

Okay.

Now you know. Hallelujah. How many bloggers make 120 grand a month?

Well, I'm in a very good spot. I mean, I write about what I love, and that's startups. And it just so happens that we are hitting a sweet spot with funding right now, and startups have money to spend. You know, I actually counsel against buying ads on TechCrunch. I don't think it's necessarily a good use of your money, but you'll cash the check, and we will cash a check. But we only take startups that we actually like. There's a site. Does anybody here know what Paper Post is? It's. Paper Post is. Paper Post is a site that pays bloggers to write about what advertisers want them to write about. So if you're Microsoft and you want to push the Xbox, you can go to Paper Post and say, Microsoft hasn't done this. As far as I know, we'll pay every blogger $10 or $100 just to write about Xbox. And they don't have to disclose it. I don't like the site very much, and I've written negative things about it. They tried to advertise on TechCrunch. It actually got through, and we accepted it. And then I saw it and we canceled it. So we only take people. We support their products, and I generally advise against it when they ask me about it, but some companies, they really want to do it.

And what is your rationale to tell someone not to advertise on your blog?

Well, I can't, out of one side of my mouth, say it's stupid. To go to demo and pay them money, and it's stupid. And then out of the other side of my mouth say, hey, give me money to put yourself up on TechCrunch. There are a lot of sites that, for whatever reason, we just don't want to write about them. We pass on them. Either it's a me too or it's just not something that's catchy enough for the audience. And for them, they found it to be a good way to get some exposure by putting an ad up. But certainly if we write companies that we. I know, again, this goes against our business, but if I'm writing about a company already and we really like the company, it's absolutely asinine to pay us for advertising. And you should never do it because the audience already knows about you.

What tools do you use to write your blog?

Use WordPress. We're on our own version of WordPress with a lot of custom plugins and we use Media Temple for hosting.

Okay, and what's the editor that you use? Or is it.

I use the WordPress default editor and I write. Actually, we go direct to code. We don't write with a WYSIWYG editor.

So you're writing in HTML.

I'm writing in HTML. Because you have a lot of control then, and you have the absolute control over how it looks.

And I think I obviously am a blogger also, and I am amazed at the lousiness of. Of blog editors. It's just stunning to me that there's nothing that's WYSIWYG and generates anything decent in HTML. It's amazing to me.

Yes.

An opportunity. You heard here first. In your wildest dreams, did you foresee that TechCrunch would be this powerful thing that's making companies and making 100 grand a month and all this?

No. And I don't necessarily like that because one thing I don't want is I don't want to miss the next slideshare and not write about them because I'm on vacation or I'm in a bad mood that day or whatever. And then there's some actual consequences to that company. There's a certain responsibility now that I feel like not miss something because entrepreneurs pour their heart into these companies. I'm an entrepreneur. I know exactly how much you put into it. Sometimes you sacrifice your family life, sometimes you're certainly sacrificing salary where you could be somewhere else making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in some cases. And then because I miss it, I've actually hurt the company. I mean, I never really wanted to be in that position. I'm doing things to mitigate that. So we've hired an analyst. We have another couple of writers to try to really look at everything that comes in. But I still think, I still stay up at night thinking, wow, if I missed a company and it hurt them a little bit, that's not so great.

That's a wonderful story, Mike. I almost want to cry.

I meant that.

I said it's wonderful.

I did mean that. I did meant that.

I have sort of an opposite question then. So what happens if you write about a company you're really jazzed about and it turns out to be a piece of crap and you hurt customers who tried it or used it? What about that responsibility? Because you don't spend days and days testing.

Well, generally you're talking about. Generally you're talking about wasting their time, the customer's time. And all I can say is I write what I really think. If I'm wrong because I haven't taken enough time with the application, then I tend to hear about it in comments.

And how do you scale? Are you writing every one of these? You mentioned an analyst.

I have another writer, TechCrunch. The natural audience for TechCrunch is probably about where it is. It's a couple hundred thousand people a day. I think really want to know about the next new startup. But the other blogs we're launching, I think that's how we scale, is we launch additional blogs with very focused content.

So with 50 or 100 gadgets being announced today, how do you possibly compare a Q versus Nokia or water?

I don't. So we have a team in New York. The guy that runs it is named John Biggs. He writes to the New York Times once a month. He used to run Gizmodo. They have a team of like five people, and they write 25 times a day. So I don't know how they do it. I'm fascinated by it. And it's a very different style than TechCrunch, but it seems to work.

It seems that the obsession of many bloggers, myself included, is to rise in the rankings of Technorati. However, as a blogger who's been blogging for about a year now, I get more and more. I just don't understand Techno Roti. Every time I go up or down five numbers, I lose 300 links. I gain 300 links in a day. I don't understand it. And then along comes this thing called Digg. And if you get on the front page of Digg. I can tell you that when I get on the front page of Digg, I get 60,000 page views that day. So can you just comment? Is it the Technorati 100 that's the important thing? Or is it the number of times you're on Digg, or is it page views? Or how do you keep score? How do you.

I think I look at all those things. So the Technorati list is important. And what they do is they look at unique links, which means if a single blog links to you twice, it only counts as once over the last six months. And so you do see, it fluctuates. It's not just a number that keeps going up.

But doesn't that penalize, hypothetically, someone who's a great blogger, who's blogging consistently good stuff that you fall off after six months?

I don't know. I think I'm number five or six on that list. So I think it's a perfect.

Yeah, well, see, I'm 46. I think it's flawed.

But, you know, Digg is good. You know, Digg definitely sends page views and Slashdot sends page views, but it's usually sort of a one stop. You know, they come in, they look at it and they bail. And sometimes they leave really bad, you know, snarky comments as well. But it certainly is nice to keep the page view numbers up. You know, what really matters to me personally is the RSS number number. It's the number of actual RSS subscribers to the blog. And for us, it's a number that. It's funny, if you're reading TechCrunch via RSS, you're probably not generating any revenue.

For me, you do a full feed, right?

Not a partial. Most likely, you're not coming to the blog very often to read the stuff because you're seeing it in the RSS reader. There's no ads and I'm not making any money. But honestly, those are the readers I love the most. They're the ones that care enough to have taken steps to put me in their RSS reader and because they want to read my stuff every day. And they're the people that are the most loyal and they're the ones I care most about.

Now, earlier you gave us a number for the number of page views or uniques per day. That was 100,000, did you say? And that does not include how many RSS readers, Right?

It doesn't include the RSS.

So how many RSS readers do you have?

130 something thousand? Yeah.

Okay. So on any given day, if every RSS reader read it and didn't come to the page, so you're not counted Twice, you have 200,000, 250,000 people reading.

Yeah, I think if I write about a startup, you're probably, you know, your logo, I always include a logo is probably going to be in front of a couple of hundred thousand people. How many of those read it? It's a fraction of that. And then how many of those try it out? It's a fraction of that. But, you know, we have had startups that have said, you know, they've gotten 20,000 new users from a TechCrunch post, but. And that's great. But I think that's the case where it's an exceptional product that people really want to try.

I don't know about you as a writer like this, but as a vc, we constantly get people who say, well, we're using your analogy. We're like MySpace, but only for people in the AARP. And so that's enough of a differentiation. You should write about us. What would you say to something?

Well, you know, quite often I'd say that's not something we're going to write about. But then, you know, these companies do well. So if, you know, it's funny, if you look at just the pure social networking space, say the core audience of, say, 15 to 35 year olds address that, you've got, you've got tagged. In addition to MySpace, you've got tagged Bebo Pixo, Tag World, who am I forgetting? Yeah, yeah, I've heard that one. And you know, these are all of them. Every single one of the companies I just mentioned are funded by frontline VCs, like top or second tier VCs, and they're all addressing the exact same crowd and their page views, every single one of them, their pages are going up by 20, 25, 30% a month. And so I don't know where the end of social networking is. I think maybe we're in the infancy. I mean, if you think about how successful MySpace is and what a terrible user experience it is, and you think about that, and I don't think I'm 36, I don't think I'm that old that I really would think MySpace was cool if I was 18 years old. I mean, I think there's aspects to it that are nice, but I personally think Facebook is much more interesting. It's a much cleaner layout. But I think we're in the infancy of social networking. I think if you Think about some of the virtual reality stuff that's going on with Second Life and World of Warcraft. I think ultimately that's a lot more interesting for people is to combine social networking. What's the difference between MySpace and World of Warcraft? It's just the interface, right. And you get to do stuff. But Second Life to me, let me think about that. But Second Life to me is a much more interesting version of MySpace than MySpace is. And so as sort of virtual reality technologies evolve over the next few years, part of that's bandwidth constraints into the house as well. But as these technologies evolve, I think there could be a period where instead of people spending an average of 17 minutes a day on MySpace, I think we're going to have a real problem with people spending 20 hours a day in these virtual. Interesting anymore. What is interesting, of course, are the people that are actually making the shows. So if you own a show, whether it's a network or an individual or a group, they certainly are going to have ways to make a lot more money. They're so scared of BitTorrent, they're so scared of getting the Daily show over BitTorrent that they're losing ad revenue that way. But if you think about BitTorrent as just this incredibly efficient mechanism for distributing files around the Internet, it's the greatest gift to content manufacturers ever made.

But what's your opinion of.

You don't want to go down that line?

No, no, I'm fine. I think they're dead too. What's, what's your opinion of. We get a lot of pitches where companies say, we're a user generated content web 2.0 social networking site and our business model is Google Adsense. We're going to have so many eyeballs and we're going to look at the text and the text is going to say, I'll meet you at the ice hockey game. And so we're going to put hockey.com with the Google AdSense. You buy that proposition. You know, Google is the business model for the, you know, for the rest.

Of us, it's the business model for MySpace. I mean, if you get enough page views, you can make some real money.

But no, that's 110 million views, right? I mean, what MySpace has. Yes, if you're, if you're Wayne Gretzky, you can play professional Hockey. If you're MySpace, you can use that model. But how about the masses of people who are creating PowerPoint pitches saying they're gonna gather a lot of eyeballs and their mechanism to monetize those eyeballs is Google.

I agree with the statement you're making without making, which is that that's not a good business model in general. But remember, my criteria for writing is very different than your criteria for investing. You know, if you're.

You'd be surprised.

If it's a. You know, I wrote about a site called Ebible probably six months ago that I don't even know if they have a business model. But, you know, they. That they took the Bible and they put it online and it's got all these like, just really cool little web 2.0 features and it was a massively popular article. I mean, it's just that stuff's interesting to read about or covering gay dating sites. I don't know if gay dating sites are a good business model or not, but it's great for generating controversy on the site. And I'm going to write about that stuff. And whether or not if I had money I'd invest in the next gay dating site or the next Bible online, I probably wouldn't invest in those companies necessarily, because there's so many. But, you know, it's a great story.

So probably a gay Christian would really have a hard time with you, huh?

There is actually a company that has both a Christian dating site and owns a bunch of porn companies as well.

Really?

And they keep the brand separate, but we buy.

That's nice of him. I hope that guy doesn't forget his Toshiba laptop. Are there any questions from the audience? Because this is your chance to get on this Michael Arron's radar. Not that I want your pitch right now, but yes, since you're using a Macintosh, I'm calling you.

What do you do about comments spam?

Who, me?

What do you do? Well, we use.

Oh, what do you do about comment spam or track back spam, I would assume. Right.

So I define comment spam as both spam and comments that piss me off. For truth spam. For TrueSpam, we use WordPress. And there's Akismet, which is a really nice plugin. I think they charge, but I've never paid the license fee and I think I technically owe them $5 a month. But that's a really good way of dealing on WordPress with spam. But when it comes to, you know, there's a lot of comment. If you leave a real name, I'm probably not going to delete your comment no matter what you say. But if you leave a comment that's just ridiculous and it's anonymous, you know it's going to get deleted pretty quickly.

I tend to leave everything except stuff in Chinese characters because I don't know what they're saying. And it's unlikely.

You delete those.

I delete those, absolutely. I look for those. I'm hunting for those. Yeah, I delete all. And they're always sent by this guy whose name is sdssf. I don't know why and would I. I always leave comments that rip me. I don't care, because there's going to be five more people who defend me. So I like those. If someone leaves a comment that is totally irrelevant, I cut it out. I have someone who goes in and checks my blog during the day and eliminates those for me because it really. I use TypePad. It does not have as good spam filtering as WordPress, so I don't hesitate.

To throw them away.

But I do keep anything negative I prefer. I like when people say negative things because then it generates more comments. Any other questions? Yes.

Does blogging ever have any legal ramifications?

I'm sorry?

Has blogging putting your heart and soul on a piece of paper or actual piece of paper has ever had any legal.

Okay, so the question is, has blogging and expressing your opinion had any legal ramifications?

I think the real issue is whether there's certain protections that common law in the United States gives to journalists. And Apple is forging new ground here by suing the hell out of bloggers in particular, ironically. Yeah. And I've gotten a cease and desist letter from Apple actually, too.

Really?

Yeah. Which I posted and got great page views. But if you think about, if you.

Think about, you know, you could help make Apple successful.

There's a fine line between, you know, where you're talking about libel and slander laws and sort of, you know, and then sort of, you know, just free speech. You know, it's. Those things need to be worked out. But, you know, as you have, you know, millions of people expressing their opinions online, the law hasn't caught up with that yet, and it will over time. But I suspect that, you know, especially in this country, that free speech will tend to prevail and that for the most part, people will be able to do what they want on their blogs as long as they're not damaging other people.

My response to that is, if you watch my blog, I never or hardly ever, I never really rag on something or say negative stuff. If I write about something on my blog, it's because I like it. So if I don't like it, I just won't write about it. I won't write negative things about it because I just. Life is too short for me.

So.

Yes, over here.

Well, it's interesting. We start checking job candidates now for their gloss, and some of the stuff they write is completely not in the interest of their job hunt.

Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't know if you had any thoughts about.

Okay, so, well, first of all, who's we? When you say we curbside, I mean.

The company that I'm listing. Okay.

So this gentleman works for a company, and they check people's blogs who are applying for. For the jobs to the company. So you want to know what we think of that?

Yeah, I think it's a bad idea.

Do you check the blog?

Yeah, well, I don't think it's necessarily bad to check the blog, but I think it's bad to judge people for things that are on their blog. Let's say that there's a guy in college that smokes pot and occasionally talks about it and he gets drunk and maybe. I mean, he just does stupid stuff that you look at and you're just thinking, like, that's kind of lame. I don't think I'm going to hire that guy. You know what? People go through different life stages. You know, you don't want people. I think that. Actually, let me rephrase my answer. I think that in general, as a society, we're going to become much more forgiving of people's past indiscretions because we have to, and everybody has it. And you don't want to be silent and people aren't.

Well, it starts at the president and works his way.

It does, yeah. I would say, by the way, we didn't hire them if there was bad stuff there. I'm just saying we look at it and the survey does color our perception. I don't think it should. I don't think it should. You might get a really good employee that you pass on. You know, I mean. I mean, what. Give me an example. What did they say? Well, one of them was a person who was basically applying for a product manager role, who was a lawyer and basically was put on a blog that they were just essentially looking for a job for food, which isn't very. As an employer. Makes sense. Well, sure, yeah. That's just stupid writing. And they're looking for a job to feed themselves, and you're looking for passion and energy and commitment, and you've got that coming the other way. And they also had a whole history of other indiscretions which, frankly, I can tell you, my history is probably hers was less bad than mine, so I didn't care about that part of it. But that, like, what kind of bad stuff have you done?

I know, I know. You tend to work too hard, you're too honest, you put your company ahead of your family life.

I just forgive too easily.

Yeah, right, right. Another question.

I remember when I worked for Transmeda that they won an award from Red Herring for most influential company, even though they had no idea what Transmeda actually did at the time. Do you see any way for startups and stealth modes that create buzz for themselves other than hiring minus four vaults? Well, I think the first thing any startup should do is start a blog. If you don't have a blog, that's like 80% of the game right there, your most passionate users will read that blog. And especially before launch, you get some buzz going. Hey, we're doing something, we're not going to say what it is. That's the easiest thing. And then from there, you also tend to meet other bloggers when you blog. You're linking to them, they're linking back to you, and that's. I think that's the best thing you can do.

Do you have any tips now that you've convinced everybody to write a blog? That's the first 90%. The second 90% is getting people to read it. So do you have any tips for new bloggers, how to get people to read their blog?

Yeah, well, do what I did. If you look back at my early posts in 2005, I linked like. I linked like a whore is what I did. I mean, I was out there and I linked to like, I would literally, I'd do a post on blog lines, you know, and then I'd say, other blogs who've written about this and they'd see. And I'd make sure I got the track backs in because bloggers love the links. And it worked. It was just instinct for me, but it worked and they started linking back.

To me by instinct. You're a whore, you're saying. Yeah, okay, at least you're honest. This thing recorded, it's being broadcast live.

But I think linking to other bloggers and saying something intelligent is always a good start and go from there. Any other?

No, that's it. Any other questions? Yes. What's the most exciting thing you guys are seeing?

When are you launching your startup? When are you launching your startup? We met a year ago. What's it called?

Stickies.

Is it launched now? Am I getting the exclusive on it.

Yeah, but you said it was revolutionary, right?

I've been behind on email, but we should. Yeah, I'd love to. What's your question?

What's the most exciting thing you guys are seeing at Bloggers? That's bringing blogging and RSS to the mainstream. And that goes hand in hand with. You're saying there's 130,000 people who are reading your RSS screen.

How do you know that they're actually reading? Well, feedburner tells you a little bit. If people are clicking on things, like for instance, they click on a link in the Feed reader. Feedburner notices it and assumes that there's some reading going on. But generally you don't. You don't know. I just know that. I mean, you just start to tell, you know, somebody's reading something, right? There's 80, 90 comments on a post. Somebody read it. So.

Well, it's no worse than the BPA for a magazine, right? The BPA for A magazine says 500,000 people subscribe. You count them, right. You don't say, did you really read that magazine when it came to your house? And you tell the advertisers it's 500,000. In fact, you tell the advertisers it's 500,000 plus, they pass it along to four people. It's really 2 million. So I figure people forward my feed 10 times, right?

Yep. At least.

How about yes, You've been sued twice.

What did you do?

You shouldn't have talked about how you didn't report the taxi. Anyway, we went up to the 11th Circuit Court. So what's the question? What were you writing about that?

Were you trying to manipulate stock prices? This doesn't sound like the whole story.

Well, it doesn't.

Right. And I'm not saying tilapia. I mean, it sounds like there's more to it than that.

So it's that old weapons of mass destruction. We are not going to end on that question. We're taking one more question. A good, serious. No, we're going to take it from this woman here.

Oh, God.

I have a question for him. You know, you guys, we have a separate small room over there. I want a serious good question that people might learn over here.

So my question is, do companies ever come to you for advice prior to.

Going through the process? Yeah, but they don't want it.

That's a good question.

Yeah, but they don't really want it.

So the question is, do companies come to you prior to you trying to write about it? To what help position. This is where you. What did Mary say? When you want money, you seek advice. When you want advice, you seek money.

Yeah, all the time. Companies come to me and say, hey, I don't want you to write about me. I really just admire you. I read every word you write, and.

I think that I gotta stop drinking this while you.

And the thing is, I'm a failed entrepreneur over and over. If you look at my track record, the last person in the world you want to get business advice or product advice is me. I mean, I actually sold a company for $32 million and didn't make a dime on it because the damn VCs made all the money. But you actually don't want. Hey, come on. You're taking some shots at me, but you don't want. People generally don't really want my show. I apologize. So I think that generally, I assume that they really just want to get written about. And if they honestly want my advice, well, honestly, I'm not in the business to do that. I don't have the time, and there's better people out there to give it.

All right, so I think we got to go. You have to go to the next appointment at that Web 2.0 conference, the other conference. So thank you very much for spending this time with us.

Thank you. Thank you.