Live from Mesh – The Michael Arrington Keynote
Comments(0) Reporting live from Mesh Conference 2007:
9:38 Mesh is a little bit different in that the keynotes are conversational rather than having someone stand up and simply make a speech. Today’s first conversation is with Michael Arrington of Techcrunch.
Notes (all paraphrased):
Arrington was apparently reading 400 or 500 feeds when he started TC.
“Techcrunch France is the biggest blog in France”
“Techcrunch France is largely run from Tel Aviv”
“The best content is in the comments”
“I like rattling people and I can be rattled”
Arrington sometime deletes/edits comments that he regrets later or if things get out of hand. “Occasionally”
“I still don’t even know what a journalist is” On reporting: “If you’re first you don’t have to intelligent, witty, or insightful.”
Blogs are beating the newspapers because they are fast and they have the readers/blogosphere as fact-checkers.
“Journalists should leave the papers because they will make more money without them”
It’s opened up to the Q&A from the floor.
“Hopefully the downturn will happen in the next couple of years because it will be a lot more fun in the Valley” Too many PR and marketers are in the valley right now.
“I would have reported the Apple news about the iPhone delay.” “Engadget shouldn’t have lost credibility over this. It was Apple’s PR fault.”
If Arrington was running a newspaper: “IF it was NYT or WSJ, I would probably stop printing the newspaper and just run it online and make everything freely available. They don’t understand how much traffic they could get from having search engine indexed archives.”
“I think the next step in social networking is virtual reality.”
The people who run MySpace have no idea what they are doing. They might not be here to stay. Facebook is here to stay.
“If I say outrageous things, I make more money”
Techcrunch and Ted Murphy from PayPerPost just went head to head. Arrington “You probably only read our posts on Techcrunch where we trash you, so you probably don’t have any idea what we do.”
“I really believe my opinions are no more valid than any other… I go off on startups who are polluting/making society worse”
“We’re diversifying and we could go years without any revenue at all.”
“Facebook is probably the fastest growing photo site out there.”
The inevitable “How do I get my startup on Techcrunch?” “The best way to get me to write about something is for no one to have written about it before and the product really has to be good. There has to be a hook. It’s going to be hard for me to write about another me too product.” “I’ll never not write about something if I don’t get an exclusive. The problem is that people aren’t honouring embargoes. If the embargo is blown by someone else, I won’t write about it at all. I’m trying to bring some sanity back to the PR system.”
“Blog about what you love and you’ll be better at it.”
“Video and audio is a lot harder to make and consume. So right now Techcrunch will stick to text. I’m a writer that’s what I love to do.”
“I hired Heather because she is a steady ship. She’s brought a level of calmness to Techcrunch.”
Mesh’s official post on the keynote has been added here.