Regardless, the name-calling and assumptions on both/all parts was off base. We want opinions, but we also need to have a thick skin. (I’d like to a post about the need for a thick skin, by my blog is temporarily down ;( .)
Mike

I have so many thoughts and comments on all of this crap… and to sum it up - we could have built 10 web apps by now had all this energy been put to good.

MediaVidea has writtetn a detailed post on the ethics of Arrington and blog netwrok owners.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2006/12/ethics-101-for-blog-network-owners.html

There is an opinion cartel and they attack their enemies; that’s about it.

Hell will freeze over before the NYT criticizes CNN, Time criticizes Newsweek, or Dateline criticizes 20/20.

Joke, though I do wonder why we keep getting knocked. Wordie may not be easily categorizable, but it has a lot more traffic than many of my fancy consulting clients, and Wordie members have a rabid love for it. It makes me think that, beneath all the hyperbole, there’s a paucity of imagination in a lot of tech circles. Something looks different, can’t be easily pigeonholed? Dismiss it, and lemming on to the next video sharing site, or whatever else the flavor of the month is.

Don’t get me wrong. I love nerds too.

It is sad to see Mr. Arrington seemingly self-destruct in the comments he left on Dec 11th on that Dec 10th NYT Techcrunch post. And then shutting down the comments on that post. Plus his claims/comments here in this post which Staci has corrected.

I am sure Mr. Arrington will likely to continue to make lots of money. But to me, his credibility has been somewhat damaged by all these. It seems to show the darker side of Mr. Arrington brightly and clearly here.

On a personal note, I love to take my jabs at NYT too. I guess I will just need to be more careful on my claims if I want to be taken seriously someday.

Cheers,
Kempton

from his comment above it sounds like Arrington vs. the Times et. al goes back a bit.

Too bad — it seems like an admission right there that he has a chip about the Times and it changed the way he covered the social bookmarking addition they made.

What you don’t know about, or care about, is the fact that you were a mentor of mine and until that very day of ONA told me that you loved TechCrucnh. I often came to you for advice. Then the conference happens, and you attack me. What actually happened wasn’t juicy enough, so you changed the facts substantially. People tell me that of course you were going to pick the Times when I picked a fight with them, since you rely on them for a paycheck. Ok, fair enough. But you should not have re-created the facts for dramatic effect.

My entire point at the conference was that the times is either making writing decisions based on who’s hanging out with them at the country club, or they are negligent. The implication was that they are negligent. Stupid. Dumb. But the Times guy says the times would never engage in taking a fee for a story, implying in my mind that he’s agreeing with the negligence side of the argument.

And that could have been that. But you and Staci (who wasn’t even in the room) rewrote history to say that I accused the times of taking payments, they demanded evidence and I backed down. And I’m a bully. Yeah, I’m a bully.

The entire event was scripted to screw me over. The organizers asked me to be super controversial, that the audience would love it. I walked into an ambush. As a mentor, you should have helped me through it. Instead you trashed me, and you lied.

The omission of del.icio.us is very conspicuous. Could it be a Yahoo! conflict of interest?

There must be a conspiracy theory at play with the choice to exclude del.icio.us from there links - maybe Arrington has the scoop . . .????!

Seriously, now. That the NYT is doing this (and please spare us the chest-beating huzzahs) will mean its now ‘OK’ for other papers to do the same. Long is the tradition that a lesser paper won’t show some initiative until the NYT does it first.

Newspapers have been painfully slow to realizing the positive network effects of link love and allowing comments on ALL their content.
Now they still have about a thousand or two too many links on their home page but it is refreshing to see some leadership at NYT.com that is allowing the newsroom to engage conversations and communities.

And from a social-media-tech perspective - it’s a great example of a topically focussed aggregator driven by RSS. One of the earlier ones if I recall.