I’m not afraid. I’ll say it point blank. Michael Arrington does not deserve the success he has reached with TechCrunch. At what point do you abandon, disregard and disrespect your readers? What’s it worth?

The Scenario

Apparently, for Mike, all it takes is the promise of news coverage from Fox News to become a traitor to his readers. In case you’re unaware, TechCrunch officially endorsed two technology presidents; one from each major political party. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama. On the Republican side, John McCain.

The notion put forth was this, and I quote:

TechCrunch will endorse one candidate from each the Democratic and Republican party as the pro-tech candidate based on the popular results of reader voting and blog input from our community of technology leaders and entrepreneurs.

The Problem

It stands to reason that on the Republican side of this “tech primary”, Ron Paul would have won by a landslide. With 73%, he far overshadowed the second place runner of 16%, John McCain.

So why then, did John McCain get the TechCrunch endorsement? It wasn’t from popular result. John McCain didn’t have one-fourth the votes that Ron Paul received. According to Mike, his reasons include Ron Paul being against net neutrality and the FCC regulation of the wireless spectrum. According to the readers, that doesn’t matter, and I think Mike missed a very big part of what makes Ron Paul the landslide winner of the TechCrunch Primaries.

Ron Paul is for limited government. This means even government regulation of things like the wireless spectrum and how much net providers can charge. The thing Mike missed is that under a Ron Paul presidency, a monopoly would be a very hard thing to maintain. Ron Paul is an economist and for free market economy. This means that monopolies cannot survive because their competitors can simply undershoot them. Even in a market monopoly like the cable companies offer (relating to net neutrality), a competitor will pop up that doesn’t support a pay-for-higher-usage scheme.

As for McCain? He knows nothing of technology, and admittedly knows nothing of economics. These are issues that matter greatly to the tech sector, which as Mike has admitted is generally libertarian leaning. In fact, according to the TechCrunch primaries issue, John McCain is against net neutrality as well! In fact, in all the issues listed as the reason for endorsing McCain, he had the same stance as Ron Paul. So where do your allegiances lie, Mike?

To Mike Directly

You should believe your readers. You are not smarter than a crowd of of 10,000 voters (the amount of people who voted in the Republican “tech primary”). To go against not only your readers votes, but even your own word that popular opinion would determine the outcome is an abomination. You don’t respect your readers, and you don’t deserve the success you’ve attained.

Was the promise of Fox News coverage too much to resist? They’re notorious for being anti Ron Paul, and you’ve been parading the video of yourself on Fox News to anyone with eyeballs.

After Duncan Riley’s antics, I was glad to see you step in and start reporting on tech news again… but I sadly took TC out of my feed reader last week. Now, I’m glad I did. You don’t deserve my time and attention span, Michael. You should probably concede to better people and consider a return to domain vulching for a living.

My Disclaimer

I am a Ron Paul supporter. My websites have been featured on TechCrunch a couple of times. I do stand to lose credibility with Mike and the awesome promotional powers TechCrunch can garner. I’m not afraid, however, to call Mr. Arrogant a shill to his face. I wash my hands of you, Mike.

Everyone is up in arms today about Ford apparently calling people pirates, trademark violators, etc. This story is a lie.

I used to own the largest Ford Escort site on the internet. In 2000, we tried to get a calendar printed through CafePress, and were told that CafePress would not print the calendar because it contained trademarked images (the vehicles). That’s it, end of story. Ford did not stop the printing of any calendars, they did not sue anybody, and truth be told they probably didn’t even write a nastygram to get their cars not printed any longer.

Everybody is seriously over reacting. It started with the sensationalist headline of the post on Black Mustang Club, and spread from there. I doubt that 90% of the people commenting with hate for Ford even read the article and/or post it belongs to. BMC, you are not being picked on. This has been CafePress’s policy for at least 8 years.

Here’s the post I made on BMC:

Ok guys, I’ve been trying to reply to this thread all day.

The title of this thread is kind of sensationalist, and is untrue. Ford was never the one blocking your calendar from being made.

In 2000, I owned the largest ford escort site on the net. We tried to get a calendar printed up using our members photos. Cafepress refused to print it, and when I contacted them, they said I didn’t own the trademark that belonged to the cars pictured.

That’s it, end of story. Ford never said they own your images. They do, however, own the trademark to the image of the vehicle and are completely within their right to stop anyone from profiting because of it. I’m positive Ford would not have a problem with BMC making a calendar though, and as I believe I saw earlier in this thread, they were OK with it.

I used to get Ford.com IP addresses in my logs all the time and Ford never contacted me. I no longer even own a Ford, but I’m still just trying to set the record straight before however many of you swear off buying a Ford… they’re not the ones behind this. It’s been CafePress’s policy for at least 8 years.

The more I read about Jason Calacanis, the more I start to like him, despite being pretty rude to him in the past. That seems to be the trigger that makes him say something that completely resets the count, though. I’ll try to spare you an entire recap of Jason’s post about Twitter today. In summary, he gives 3 examples of why Twitter is en route to becoming a billion dollar company, despite not having a revenue model.

I guess if you’re running on investment money, it’s not that big of a deal. I do feel, however, as the CEO of Mahalo, that I should give Jason some advice; Businesses exist to make money. The time for Twitter to roll out a revenue model has come and gone. This is, however, typical of the pump and dump routine that recent websites have been giving. Pump your site up, make no revenue, sell it as a feature to another site.

In fact, I run a site that is free, and collects very little revenue. As an experiment I said the site was for sale. You know what happened? TechCrunch deadpooled it. In a way, they’re right. Despite little success (1600 users at the time; it now has well over 6000), Skinnyr was not profitable and therefore has no value on it’s own. Having value is, in my mind, the only reason for a business (note: I didn’t say website) to exist. The only value that Skinnyr possesses with it’s current implementation is supplementing another service or product. Major players in the industry with existing revenue models (Google, Yahoo) can get away with owning properties like these. Twitter can not.

Reaching “critical mass” is only useful if you’re selling a feature, not a business. Twitter is a useful feature, not a standalone businesses. Twitter could never be the next Google. The best Twitter can hope to be is on the level with MySpace, which made a measly 10 million dollar profit in mid 2007.

If that is indeed the goal of Twitter, happy hunting. A million dollars doesn’t last nearly as long as it did in the times of the dot-com bubble. The smart option is not to take an investment, not waste peoples time, and prove that your company can be profitable on it’s own two feet. If you do that, then when you sell your business you walk away with all of the money, not a small percentage of it.

Feed advertising is out of the question for Twitter. It would slice their userbase in half. Contextual advertising most likely would not even turn a profit. The only chance Twitter has for successful revenue is to add new features under a value added subscription plan. This would mean current users experience no difference in service, while paying customers receive extras. This is the only way, and there would still be the proverbial next guy who would offer those services for free.

Right here, I was about to point to classmates.com as a success story of using a value added subscription model, until further research indicated that classmates was losing money prior to being acquired in 2004.

In essence, I’ve just proven that what Jason said about Twitter’s route to profitability was wrong. Twitter has no route to profit. The only hope Twitter has is to “reach critical mass” and then get itself acquired. Either latch on to a bigger service like Wikipedia and Mozilla have done and like Wikia is hoping to do, or get acquired by a larger service.

A business should never need bailing out.

In short, you need a business model to run a business. You need profit to make that business worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re just rolling the dice.

UPDATE: Jakob didn’t even create the norbum.org site — We’re both assholes.

So that little snowball I started a few days ago led up to a post by Hank Williams titled “Williams: Jakob Lodwick and David Karp are assholes.” (The title has since been updated).

You see, the idea behind Jakob’s original post was obviously to have some fun tempting random passerbys to figure out his new URLs. In doing so, I was having fun by speculating what it was he was working on. I had more fun with it yesterday. Is this news? Hardly.

Jakob decided to have some fun based on a user comment. The user’s comment was that “maybe it’s a crowd sourcing effort about Nordstrom’s new lineup for bums.” This is pretty funny by itself, given the odd domain name. Jakob had some fun with it by posting the quick little site that he made. Is this a giant morally wrong thing to do? Not really. It was done in lighthearted fun. We’re all having fun here except you, Hank.

Somehow, Jakob invoked your protective gene and you went as far as calling him David assholes on a pretty well-read blog. This is fine, as you have your opinion, but please remember what the power of a readerbase can do to someone’s reputation.

In all actuality, posting photos of the homeless is hardly making fun of them. Saying a website is about homeless fashion is not offensive.

That said, the thing that prompted me to post this wasn’t your anger — it was your use of race to draw a parallel between your feelings and the feelings of homeless people. I would like to know how being black has anything to do with being homeless. Are you saying that because you’re black you’ve faced ridicule? Do you think you’re less welcome in the tech community because you’re black? Would you be upset if someone made a website about the fashion of black people and African Americans? If you’re going to draw a parallel, please don’t play the race card. Given that you’ve only posted 3 times in the last year on your own blog, I can see something had to upset you.

Lighten up a bit. Have fun with life. This isn’t as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be, unless you think you’ve found your cause… in which case there are far more important ways to protect the homeless in this world.

If you want a parallel, I’ve got one for you. I’ve been homeless before. Although it was relatively brief compared to a lot of people in this country (a few weeks), it was still the worst experience of my life. I can promise you, I would much rather be black than homeless. Do you see now why I consider your parallel to be asinine? The next time you decide to call someone an asshole, make sure you’re not being one yourself.

Ok, so my little story about Jakob Lodwick and Norbum made a few waves. It has taken off quite a bit… and so far no one is talking. A few people know, but again, no talkie. It is fun to guess, though.

First, I don’t think David Karp is involved. He’s having fun with it, but I think involving him in the initial speculation was inaccurate.

Mareen Fischinger has given me a fresh idea, though. In a recent tumblr post, she put up a picture and called it “The beautiful town of Norbum”. This picture has fueled my next guess.

Jakob Lodwick is moving to the valley.

Is this it? Recently single and jobless Jakob may be looking for a fresh start, and what better place than Silicon Valley to work on his next project? In the process, Jakob may have acquired himself a nice little house, which is where Mareen’s picture was taken from.

So why Norbum? What is a Norbumist? What is Norbumism?

Northern California is often referred to as “NorCal”. So, perhaps Jakob is planning a little venture, blog, tumblog, etc. about life in Northern California… maybe “bumming around”? Is Norbum the name of the new Lodwick palace? Are party goers nicknamed Norbumists? Is the practice of attending Lodwick parties now called Norbumism?

It’s a stretch, I know… but it’s fun to guess!