Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit"
blog.last.fm
blog.last.fm
Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider public, which scares the life out of me!
"Techcrunch is full of shit" would be right.
TechCrunch = a corporation A corporation = a legal person Singular, not plural!
Probably because his comment isn't interesting, isn't relevant, and doesn't contribute to discussion. There are all kinds of true but uninteresting comments one can make, but making them shouldn't be encouraged.
Edit: I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but actively discouraging uninteresting comments is what keeps the signal:noise ratio high here.
The idea of a "corporate person" is much more recent, like 1880's, and I think started in the US.
From wikipedia:
In the late seventeenth century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as,
"a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property..."
"Companies are singular".
Which indeed they are, although staffed by multiple individuals.
Your pants must be very soiled. Did you know that the wider public reads tabloids as well? Did you know that they read gossip rags? CLEAN UP IN AISLE GSTAR!
Thanks for your concern though, and I'll just clean up with this copy of the Mirror.
My bet is they completely ignore it.
- Doesn't have original content
- Isn't that focused on startups anymore
- Tends to focus on the nerdy extreme of the startup spectrum
- Doesn't have nearly as broad an audience
Go away, TechCrunch.
Frankly, I'm disappointed by this thread. HN's audience is supposedly smarter than your average Internet crowd. But all I'm hearing here is cheap bashing of the target that everyone loves to hate. Can anyone do better and post an intelligent comment that addresses the topic?
Again, TechCrunch is not boring. One of its strengths is not so much the "breaking news" aspect, but the tongue-in-cheek or tell-it-like-it-is.
In many news organizations, politically correct has removed any spark of interesting content. Not at TechCrunch. It's news with an attitude. You may or may not like the attitude, but at least there's one.
[disclaimer: you can accuse me of bias because of my company connections to TC, but it also means that I got to see some of the behind the scenes and I learned a lot doing so]
There was an article a week or so ago about how people were complaining every time Techcrunch posted a story about some Twitter application. The author of the article wrote back in protest basically saying, "well if you don't like the articles, don't comment on them."
Techcrunch generates buzz. They're good at it. I may live in a hole, but I didn't really hear about Last.fm until Techcrunch posted that story. Last.fm got a pageview from me off of that story.
And personally, I don't really care about TC's opinion. I'm smart enough to make my own judgment. But until they report it, I have little way discovering new companies.
A while back I had sworn the site off because of link baiting headlines and the fantastically smarmy tone of some of the stories, but hey, there is still an occasion nugget or two.
these points are both true, but they don't alter the fact that Techcrunch is also full of shit.
I typically don't advise people to read articles that are full of shit.
I think people who whine about TC articles and think they are full of shit are in the minority. Their fan base seems to be growing rapidly. You can't impress everyone with your writing. And besides, TC is a blog. I think you're entitled to say whatever you want, even if its full of shit.
I'd now like to get the spitter's side of the story.
(Anyway, I don't think this is important. Very few people with money to spend have ever heard of TechCrunch. Their opinion mostly matters in the VC echo chamber, not in the real world.)
The linkbait accusation is also a little odd coming from someone who submits practically every linkbait TechCrunch article that shows up in the RSS feed.
Can you imagine how low you'd have to be to fake an incident like that just to get a few hits? Arrington has his faults, but he's not a showboater.
(Also remember that this article was posted while he's taking a break from TechCrunch entirely. Don't blame him for this story.)
Frankly, I think that people who react to aggression with more aggression are wasting their time and looking pretty stupid.
I live in a world where people are innocent until proven guilty, people are all generally trying to do the right thing, the average man on the street doesn't like physically hitting other people, and most people don't have deadly diseases, and that the ones that do don't spit.
I believe you are correct. I have no clue whether vaksel is American, but I do think Americans (I'm one) have absorbed--been fed?--a fair amount of hooey about HIV transmission and how to be "safe." Keep in mind, if you're old enough, AIDS was/is "that gay disease" and something quite a small number of injecting druggies were getting--as the "need" for a War on Drugs was building. I'm sorry to report, Americans are a fearful lot.
I think most humans are irrationally fearful about things like HIV.
Mike is running a start-up. I can respect that. He sacrifices a lot of quality to be the first man on the scene: I don't like that, but I'm impressed as hell at his track record. He has a history of being a socialite and a bit of a jerk, neither of which I like, but at the same time that doesn't make him a bad person, just a person period.
I spent my high school life fiddling with computers, writing, and talking to teachers, and I had incidents of bullying myself. The whole "picked-on pickers-on" idea is a false dichotomy.
I got my black belt when I was something like twelve, though, so if necessary I'd do what I had to then get away. But I don't like the thought of violence: I'd never find it necessary. People drop things if you ignore them.
Additionally, I dont actually see anyone blaming Arrington in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491784
that's silly. I swallowed some water but there was a fly in the water somehow, it was wriggling, so I reflexively spat and your face just happened to be there. that's just one of many great excuses for spitting in somebody's face.
more seriously, there might or might not be any excuse for it, but if you thought it was anything but a matter of time, that's unrealistic. the appropriate response is just blogging that they're full of shit, but inappropriate responses still fit in an overall system of cause and effect.
Of course, with MA's combative personality, it may go slightly differently, but it's probably a net positive for TC. Sadly enough.
Either produce the hard evidence or apologise.
"Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either."
Is his last word on the matter. Essentially he is saying they have denied it but his "rumor" may even still be true.
That smacks of a lie somewhere along the line to me (and as it is my job to find lies I suspect it is the case). :)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-ov...
I have a serious problem using '...' in writing unless it's from the person's mouth. I always learnt if someone says something directly to you then use '...' and if it comes indirect you use "..." so all novels should use "..." because it's fiction and was never said. Yet so many printing houses have gone away from using "..." and have switched to using the quotation form '...'.
I'm unsure why I get worked up over this, I guess I just think it's stupid so few people have control over how the masses perceive the English language. This is a prime example, in the US most institutions use 'is' in this situation, to such a degree that 'are' looks bizarre and the opposite happened in the UK.
The same is with 'ise' and 'ize'. Using 'ize' is so prevalent in the US that in many words the letter S is being supplanted with Z in situations it's not supposed to be. The prime example is how analyse is incorrectly spelled (even in spell checkers) as analyze and I'm sorry but it is technically correct to substitute the suffix 'ise' for 'ize', however analyse is a complete word without suffix, it's not discussing anal.
As for the quotes, I suspect you'll need to unlearn that rule. I'm not even sure how you got there, except perhaps by misunderstanding the rules for nested quotations, Eg:
"She was absolutely furious, she shouted, 'I hate you' and then ran off," said John
(If it helps any US readers to understand the British usage of plurals, think about the police. You wouldn't write "Police says it has arrested two suspects, but it is still hunting for two more", right? That dissonance is exactly the same as how US usage of the singular, particularly when it comes to music groups -- "U2 says it will tour in the fall" -- sounds to Brits. )
Would the British rendition be "U2 say it will" or "U2 say they will"?
I have the same problem, I just don't approve of 'style'
No kidding, comma splicer!
There are lots of personal style
That's certainly one of them!
and it does amazing
It sure does!
but there are company style guides and printing houses all have different ones.
Just transpose the earlier comma to before the and, and you're all good!
I think I'll stop here. Can't help but feel trolled...
While this is terribly unprofessional, Techcruch had it coming to them.
(and yeh I read his early stuff: not a fan. At every stage in a startup you have to get to a stage where you need to show some professional gloss to prove your not just another backroom programmer - IMO it is the core reason why a lot fail, they cling slavishly to that "fun guy" image and lose corporate custom because of it ;))
@the previous poster: I wouldnt call it unprofessional per se. Empassioned perhaps :D
sorry for the OT :)
"Thanks Last.fm for all the free PR" Sincerely, M.A.
Oops.