I was honestly out to thrash you guys in the comments when i read the title. But the article indeed turned out interesting. I guess this is what people have now termed "growth hacking"!
I made sure to explicitly thank TechCrunch at the end of the article as BetaList wouldn't be there if it weren't for them.
In reality, blogs make their money on advertising so if they publish downright fabrications or knowingly stretch the truth, they do not care as long as they are getting clicks.
In other words, don't feel bad for the blogs.
It would be different of course if I swapped out the sites at the last minute, lied to them about how long I've been working on it, etc, etc, but that wasn't the case.
Again, not sure if you were saying you thought it was unethical, just trying to clarify.
What I wrote was in response to the notion that he would be angered had you actually "tricked" TechCrunch into writing about you. They, after all, are the one's publishing the story so if they print information that is untrue that they didn't bother vetting, that's their fault, not anybody else's.
If I send a bogus tip to the Washington Post and they immediately run a story on it without question, that's incredibly irresponsible on their part and the fault lies with them. That may seem like an unlikely scenario, but the same thing happens on a daily basis on blogs and slightly lesser-known news outlets with readership in the millions.
(In this case there was not much to vet for TechCrunch of course as they could see what I described exist)