The crowd was small, our spy reports — "about 20-30 people, mostly TechCrunch50 finalists." SearchMe.com was one of the finalists — "some woman even Twittered that they got in." Arrington drives a gray Porsche, and "left with a ladyfriend, didn't get to see who." (Anyone know who he's dating? Do tell!) On to the pictures!

Arrington, even as host, never could seem to crack a smile:

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde watches from the sidelines:

Arrington and Del Conte catch up:

For contrast, Web editors at Wired.com abandoned decks a year ago, replacing them with a mix of standalone headlines and excerpted blog posts.

An explanation at TechCrunch says a main goal was to "reduce load times" for the home page. More effective than reducing the amount of story text, TechCrunch's home page clutter of ads and widgets has been trimmed by about 20 percent, compared to old screenshots.

I'm sure clever commenters are already concocting their Valleywag-are-hypocrites posts, but here's what you don't know: We fight over stuff like this all the time. I'm a fan of the all-on-one-page format, for easy sneak-reading at work. Certain sweater-clad people here beg to differ.

"This was not going to be your mommy's website ... I wanted it to feel like a fashion and beauty magazine but with tremendous depth," Notkin told the Post blog. For "depth," read "Twitter," which Notkin credits with leveraging her brand or whatever nonsense phrase we're using today to excuse egolinking.

SavvyAuntie was among the most oft-Twittered words on its launch day — "her marketing is genius," said TechCrunch's snackiest flack, Calley Nye, before her own post got pulled, for, we guessed, overdoing the PR-speak. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's unpublishing of Nye's post, not the brilliance of SavvyAuntie's business plan, was likely what launched it into Twitter microfame. But Notkin is a genius for spinning the snafu as an event that promoted her "visibility." Someone else's baby, someone else's blunder — it's all fodder for Notkin's marketing event. That's really savvy.

(Photo by Kelly Sue)

What I’ve seen from Mike Arrington has just been classless,” he said. “I don’t understand what business objective he has other than to get notoriety.”

Arrington, for his part, admitted to enjoying a good wallow in the mud. [NYT] (Photo by Pete Jelliffe)

PR as a profession is broken. Most PR folks don’t read blogs and certainly don’t understand them. All they see is a Google alert with their clients name. For me PR is the last refuge when I’m attacking a story. What do you do if you’re a startup looking for help in getting the word out about your company? First off, don’t hire PR help. Start your own blog. And in your leisure time participate in the fascinating conversations occurring on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Great, except for one thing: Can anyone name a startup founder with leisure time?

(Photo by Jay Meattle)

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

At August, things got crowded up real fast. There were more women in the crowd this year, a change from sausagefests past. But they were hardly breaking Valley gender barriers. The marketers at the Plista booth lamented that their competitors were getting attention by hiring cute girls to serve free beer. (I still don't remember what Plista does.) A fellow with an accent — possibly a put-on — asked Yahoo Tech Ticker cohost Sarah Lacy if she worked in PR, because "you're so pretty." Here's Lacy's account of the conversation:

Dude: "You girls are really lovely you must work in PR."
Lacy: "Did you really just say that? That's incredibly insulting. Never say that to a woman in any business setting."
Dude: "No, I just mean because every pretty girl I've met here is in PR."
Lacy: "Yes, I know what you meant. that's why it's insulting. It's like assuming a woman in an office is a secretary."
Dude: "Blah blah."
Lacy: "You know what? There's a lot of people i actually want to talk to here." (walks off)

He came up to me TWICE after that, interrupting conversations to apologize.

Lacy: "Look, I don't care dude. just don't ever say it again because it's textbook insulting."

Everyone was mesmerized by Julia Allison, the former Star editor-at-large (read: TV spokesperson) turned Wired covergirl. That is, if you were important enough to warrant a conversation with her. Once the 30 seconds of polite time she gives you is up she'd turn free agent and could easily be stolen by somebody like Facebook's Dave Morin. Speaking of being mesmerized, rap impresarios MC Hammer and Chamillionaire showed up as well. They mingled amongst the geek kids talking about tech and rap while the Olds just guffawed at the entire thing from afar.

As the party wound up and the business-card-swapping got all the more frantic, Duck9's Larry Chiang put his afterparty plan into motion. His brilliant scheme: Send the entrepreneurs a URL with an invite to the Four Seasons Palo Alto and misdirect the venture capitalists with an otherwise identical invite to the Westin — a plausible location, since that was where Chamillionaire was staying. For non-VCs, the choice came down to Chiang's pool party at the Four Seasons, or Julia Allison's expedition to the Cheesecake Factory with Randi Zuckerberg, the nerd chanteuse and sister of Facebook CEO Mark. I crashed the pool party. I like to think I made the right decision for Valleywag readers.

At the Seasons, we saw Brian Solis working the crowds like a pro. Justin Kan of Justin.tv enjoying the jacuzzi in his underwear surrounded by girls. Shira Lazar mingled with Michael Arrington (perhaps prepping for an interview). And I even witnessed Jason Baptiste of Publictivity pitch a movie deal to Sarah Lacy based on her book. Michael Cera to play Zuckerberg anyone?

Which brings us to a tweak in Arrington's business model. Michael, instead of charging sponsors for booths at the party party, why not sell sponsorships at the afterparty? I don't remember any of the companies who paid for my attention on Sand Hill Road. But the scenes of Silicon Valley's finest stumbling around at poolside? Burned into my memory.

Arrington desperately wants to sell, that's for sure. But a Fox Interactive-TechCrunch linkup makes little sense on the surface — Fox Interactive chief Peter Levinsohn is said to loathe Arrington, or at least dislike him. And yet Levinsohn, who has practically no control over Fox Interactive's largest business, MySpace, might conceivably be eager to buy a tech blog which gives him, if not traffic, some industry clout. After all, that's why Murdoch owns the reportedly unprofitable New York Post.

But the biggest problem with an Arrington deal is, well, Arrington. Recent rumors had AOL acquiring TechCrunch for $30 million. That deal didn't go forward, we're hearing, because AOL worried about Arrington's mental stability and doubted whether the brand would survive if the mercurial blogger left. As one prospective buyer put it: "We're worried about buying it and him leaving, and we're worried about buying it and him staying." Before being acquired by CBS, CNET, too, took a long look at TechCrunch, only to decide too much of its value was tied up in the volatile blogger.

Arrington is ready to check out. He was recently heard talking about plans to retire to Hawaii; other Valley sources say he's been spending a lot of time up in Tahoe. It would be the height of irony if Arrington's willingness to let go was what finally greased the wheels for a deal.

But without Arrington, is TechCrunch worth anything? That's the question. And that's why everyone's still talking. Arrington, a master of the deal-gossip game, could well be floating these rumors himself — both talk of a deal with News Corp., and signs of his pending departure — to get AOL to come back to the table. Will it get his company sold? Maybe to AOL, a company gullible enough to buy an also-ran social network like Bebo. But not to News Corp., home to the ultimate media spinner.

When Business 2.0, published by Time Inc., another arm of Time Warner, was on the rocks, its editor talked up a deal to save the magazine by merging it with TechCrunch. Those talks went nowhere. All of which makes us feel bad for TechCrunch coeditor Erick Schonfeld, who previously worked at Business 2.0; wasn't the whole idea of joining TechCrunch to escape Time Warner?

Shortly after discontinuing her own blog, Nye's byline appeared on TechCrunch, where she's become a regular contributor.

But her latest article on startup SavvyAuntie got pulled from the site shortly after being published. Despite the yanking, it still went out over the RSS wire and into a syndicated spot on the Washington Post's Web site. Could Arrington have reconsidered the wisdom of giving a professional startup rep space on the masthead?

Maybe Nye has taken off her publicity hat and decided on another career change — before marketing bands and startups with social media, she also bared all in work as a model. We can't help but admire the youngster's chutzpah, but Arrington should know that ostensible journalists laying down with their public relations enemies has traditionally been considered an ethical taboo. Next thing you know, the site might feature articles about companies written by people who've invested in them.

Investing in companies, even at late stages, is a relative bargain because of the strong euro, and once a company goes public, the returns are doubled again because companies trade at a much higher price-to-earnings ratio on average than the do in Europe. However, after telling a story about entrepreneurs turning land in southwestern France being managed by the government into a newly productive wine region from which guests were tippling the bounty, Wellington's Eric Archambeau explained that the new office was going to focus on business development. "Who needs another VC in Silicon Valley?" he quipped.

One of the companies in which Wellington has invested is Seesmic, the online-video tool founded by the crushingly gregarious Loic le Meur, who bent our ear over enabling his company's technology in our comments. If it means TechCrunch's Michael Arrington might drop by to share some of his deep thoughts, then I might just be able to make Le Meur's case with our publisher.

Social news purists will no doubt shrilly protest against TechCrunch's marketing scheme, but the rest of us know this kind of "Digg Army" approach to voting up stories on Digg.com is both inevitable, commonplace, and clever enough — until Digg's moderators or its spam-detection algorithms catch up with you. The question isn't whether TechCrunch should do this — it's why your site hasn't, you lazy punters.

It's not that amazing. As CenterNetwork's Allen Stern first pointed out, each time a new user signs up for FriendFeed, the site suggests the new user becomes friends with "Popular FriendFeeders." On the list: Bret Taylor, Fred Wilson, Scott Beale, Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte — despite, as Stern notes, the fact that many of these "popular" users don't actually use FriendFeed very often. Why? We haven't asked anybody at FriendFeed because the answer is obvious: So that the whole bunch of easily ego-fluffed blog blowhards will blog about how amazing FriendFeed is, without bothering to figure out why, exactly, it seems to be growing so much faster for them than everybody else.

I know, say it — there's women, who read Valleywag? Oh, honey. There was even something of a girl posse at the launch party back in the day, though I doubt this mystery Craigslist lady was among them as she's just relocated to the Valley. But don't hold that against her. She's in utterly shameless search of gossipy lurv, and that behavior we can only encourage.

If the ad is to be believed, she works in the Valley, and if she doesn't, God help her if she's harboring an Arrington crush. But for the sake of exploring her fantasy, let's assume she does actually work and, ahem, play here. She's looking for a guy like this not because she's so drawn into the bubble that she can't help but bring work into the bedroom, but because she gets off on it. Amazing. When did we create a fetish? As I've (mostly) sworn to never again help any of you get laid, the only advice I'll drop is this: let her make the first move when it comes to livestreaming your date.

I need more dinners out with Jason Calacanis, rarely do you see a successful entrepreneur with such balance in all aspects of his life.

Just idle speculation, granted. Calacanis may have proper balance in his life, but the workaholism he demands of employees is another matter. We know for a fact that Sean Percival, an early Mahalo employee, has moved over to startup DocStoc.

Had an email last night from someone who I really respect chewing me out completely due to a business deal with a competitor. To be precise, not just chewing me out, full blown FU I'll never talk to you again.

Sounds like "Bang Bang" Michael's silver banhammer strikes again.(Photo by Sue Waters)

It’s not clear where Garlinghouse is headed next, the rumor is multiple private equity firms are vying for his attention. Frankly, given his operating experience (he grew most of the properties under his control to no. 1 in their market, even as Yahoo search fell apart over the years), it’s too bad he isn’t ending up in a CEO role somewhere.

Any guesses as to who fed Arrington all of TechCrunch's Yahoo news?

What struck me about Hansell's piece was the use of a file photo that features a wildly grinning and unbelievably baby-faced Adelson — with professionally trimmed hair, no less! Looks a little too much like a certain viral movie marketing campaign to be a coincidence. Is the gray lady secretly synergizing with News Corp. on the latest Dark Knight release and subtly Joker-izing Adelson?

if you're a young startup looking for PR help, ping me. I have someone you'll want to meet.

For someone so sensitive to the conflicts of interests that arise through friendships (though not necessarily financial relationships), I can imagine that tech pitchfolks won't be pleased to hear that Arrington has a fave flack. Who would Valleywag go with to place an item on TechCrunch? We've heard young startuppers would be wise to choose FutureWorks' Brian Solis who's a whiz at getting clients like SezWho coverage from Arrington.

[T]hey are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model — paid content.

Funny, TechCrunch syndicates content to the Washington Post, so we're to assume that Arrington's doing it gratis. I'd just hate to think that august news organization is paying for his content. While the AP's legal effort is hamhanded, by ignoring the coop's cease-and-desist letters and forcing the issue of copyright law's "fair use" exemptions, bloggers might have an opportunity to get courts to clarify murky fair-use guidelines. But why do that when it's so much more fun to troll an organization doing scads of actual journalism around the world?

We do have a no video policy inside the ballroom as we don't have video rights to all stuff we show, so we have to do that. but we say it explicitly in the program and in notes to reporters and bloggers, so they should know. It's easier to gin up a controversy.

We've been known creative tagging for comedic purposes ourselves, but in this case, doth Wired protest too much? Perhaps so. Asked if "ButtMunch" was Wired's internal nickname fro Arrington's site, business editor Dylan Tweney said, "I don't think it has come into general usage around the Wired.com office. We can always hope, though."

• Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
• Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
• Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
• Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
• Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
• Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
• Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
• Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
• Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
• Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
• Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
• Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
• Cedric Maloux
• Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
• Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
• Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
• David Sifry (Technorati)
• Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
• Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
• Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
• Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
• Esteban Sosnik
• Esther Dyson (EDventure)
• Felix Petersen (Plazes)
• Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
• Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
• Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
• Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
• James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
• Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
• John Markoff (The New York Times)
• Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
• Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
• Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
• Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
• José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
• Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
• Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
• Lars Hinrichs (XING)
• Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
• Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
• Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
• Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
• Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
• Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
• Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
• Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
• Megan Smith (Google)
• Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
• Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
• Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
• Nikesh Arora (Google)
• Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
• Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
• R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
• Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
• Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
• Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
• Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
• Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
• Thomas Crampton (Next Media)

We've got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about.

After winning kudos from the site that chronicles startups in 2005, Michael Arrington invested in the company. Cubrilovic even contributed to the site and crashed at Michael Arrington's place for a time. What followed were many laudatory posts which, though the relationship was disclosed, didn't state the obvious — that by mid-2007 the company owed customers, investors and employees money.

The only mention that the site, and the company, was facing problems came in an addendum to a post about Joyent. Arrington had stopped writing about the company as investor, but continued to write other companies he'd funded which weren't tanking. Duncan Riley finally pointed out last January that "there are big questions about [Omnidrive's] long term viability." Riley proceeded to defend Cubrilovic on a podcast run by the entrepreneur, before one of the hosts described spending an evening at Arrington's house in January of 2007 "doing shots all night with [Cubrilovic]."

The details that I've heard are that a competitor, possibly Box.net, tried to make a deal that could have at least allowed the company to close the book on some debts; but that because of the company's structure, Cubrilovic had to sign off on the deal, yet was unreachable. Observers say that the CEO's erratic behavior showed a pattern perhaps indicative, in their opinion, of substance abuse. Former CTO Phil Morle's contention that payments went directly to an account held by Cubrilovic sounds like a recipe for a binge-spending disaster.

In an update to his original post that Cook published yesterday, the investor seemed to dance around the issue of alcoholism:

Too many parties, too many conferences, too much working between 1-4am, not enough working normal business hours, too much socializing, not enough focus, no business development, and not enough follow up and delivery.