

Last.fm: "Techcrunch are full of shit" - arthurk
http://blog.last.fm/2009/02/23/techcrunch-are-full-of-shit

======
gstar
I'm chuffed that a respectable outfit like last.fm publishes a blog post with
a title like that. About time.

Techcrunch has been on the inflection point of "mattering" to the wider
public, which scares the life out of me!

~~~
j2d2
It's not even grammatically correct!

"Techcrunch _is_ full of shit" would be right.

~~~
scott_s
The author is British:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement)

~~~
CalmQuiet
And if you get any news from bbc.co.uk or read British bloggers you'll get
accustomed to sports teams and corporations being considered plural. e.g.:
"Apple today are releasing..."

~~~
electromagnetic
Well it's accurate, a corporation isn't an individual and when you're dealing
with big business it is always controlled by multiple people so any decision
is decided by a group.

~~~
rationalbeaver
Actually a corporation is, legally, an individual.

~~~
lutorm
Unless I'm mistaken, that absurd notion is only entertained in the US.

~~~
Angostura
Nope. I am British and used to be a journalist. The first place I worked had a
very large sign on the wall:

"Companies are singular".

Which indeed they are, although staffed by multiple individuals.

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axod
It'll be interesting to see if TechCrunch acknowledge this, respond or
apologize...

My bet is they completely ignore it.

------
jonursenbach
It finally happened. Techcrunch is the new Valleywag.

~~~
vaksel
so who is the new techcrunch?

~~~
tonystubblebine
We are. Hacker News is the top spot for getting news relevant to startups.

~~~
vaksel
well we are more of a news aggregating service, need some original content.
Need more stories to break on HN

~~~
tonystubblebine
You don't have to have the same form as something in order to replace it. I
don't think the number of breaking stories has any effect on the quality of
HN.

~~~
jacquesm
In fact, I think that more 'breaking' stories is going to have a negative
effect.

~~~
electromagnetic
Agreed, more emphasis on 'breaking stories' means that there'll be more fake
'breaking stories'. Look at tabloids, the more news they 'break' the better
they sell and now everything is outright lies.

------
gregparadee
Last.FM FTW, seriously TechCrunch is getting worse and worse every week.

~~~
gstar
I (obviously) agree. You might see some reticence to post here though, as TC
is a bit of a cabal and nobody with a public profile wants to shake the cage.

~~~
jrockway
I have a public profile, and long ago dismissed TechCrunch as one of the least
intelligent blogs on the Internet. The writing is bad, the content is boring,
and now we know it's not even correct.

Go away, TechCrunch.

~~~
alain94040
Boring it's not.

Frankly, I'm disappointed by this thread. HN's audience is supposedly smarter
than your average Internet crowd. But all I'm hearing here is cheap bashing of
the target that everyone loves to hate. Can anyone do better and post an
intelligent comment that addresses the topic?

Again, TechCrunch is not boring. One of its strengths is not so much the
"breaking news" aspect, but the tongue-in-cheek or tell-it-like-it-is.

In many news organizations, politically correct has removed any spark of
interesting content. Not at TechCrunch. It's news with an attitude. You may or
may not like the attitude, but at least there's one.

[disclaimer: you can accuse me of bias because of my company connections to
TC, but it also means that I got to see some of the behind the scenes and I
learned a lot doing so]

------
physcab
If people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If Techcrunch
was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet projects that
people create.

There was an article a week or so ago about how people were complaining every
time Techcrunch posted a story about some Twitter application. The author of
the article wrote back in protest basically saying, "well if you don't like
the articles, don't comment on them."

Techcrunch generates buzz. They're good at it. I may live in a hole, but I
didn't really hear about Last.fm until Techcrunch posted that story. Last.fm
got a pageview from me off of that story.

And personally, I don't really care about TC's opinion. I'm smart enough to
make my own judgment. But until they report it, I have little way discovering
new companies.

~~~
giles_bowkett
__If people didn't like Techcrunch, they wouldn't go to the site. If
Techcrunch was irrelevant, they wouldn't generate massive leads for pet
projects that people create. __

these points are both true, but they don't alter the fact that Techcrunch is
also full of shit.

~~~
physcab
If they are, why do people post TC articles on here every few hours?

I typically don't advise people to read articles that are full of shit.

I think people who whine about TC articles and think they are full of shit are
in the minority. Their fan base seems to be growing rapidly. You can't impress
everyone with your writing. And besides, TC is a blog. I think you're entitled
to say whatever you want, even if its full of shit.

------
tarmac
This makes me think about that TechCrunchee getting spit on the face...

I'd now like to get the spitter's side of the story.

~~~
jm4
TechCrunch is awful, but there's no excuse for the spit in the face incident.
I don't give a damn what lousy, fabricated article TechCrunch might have
published to precipitate that. It's disgusting and totally uncalled for.

~~~
vaksel
who knows if that really happened, or if Arrington was just linkbaiting to
make money

~~~
unalone
Don't treat Arrington like some soulless mythical creature. He's a real
person. He's susceptible to being offended enough to get pissed off at people
and to rant even when he's been in the business for a long time.

Can you imagine how low you'd have to be to fake an incident like that just to
get a few hits? Arrington has his faults, but he's not a showboater.

(Also remember that this article was posted while he's taking a break from
TechCrunch entirely. Don't blame him for this story.)

~~~
auston
I don't think that anyone is treating him as a "soulless mythical creature", I
am interpreting this as people viewing Michael Arrington as a person of low
morals/values.

Additionally, I dont actually see anyone blaming Arrington in this thread -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491784>

~~~
unalone
There's a tendency to assume that people that aren't you are heartless and
will do things you never would do yourself. That's very rarely the case. In
this case, assuming Arrington would make a huge drama for nothing, claim
somebody did something they didn't, and leave the scene just to get some hits
is treating him like somebody who's a tad inhuman.

------
dimitry
That title is nothing new. I'm just glad someone (with a big audience) is
saying it publicly.

------
sgrove
Overall, not a bad deal for TC, I'd say. Checking on the twitter stream shows
that there's a lot of RT of this headline - which will only serve to spread
TC's name around. It may be bad in the long run, but they may be able to issue
some muted apology, patch things up, and restore their standing. More
coverage, etc.

Of course, with MA's combative personality, it may go slightly differently,
but it's probably a net positive for TC. Sadly enough.

~~~
axod
Yeah I'm guessing most people on twitter already know about TC actually. Heck
most of them probably first read about twitter on TC - they post enough
'twitter' stories there.

------
ErrantX
The most disappointing thing is that the TC writer is clinging to his story.
After a complete denial he is still trying to suggest there is some truth in
the rumor.

Either produce the hard evidence or apologise.

~~~
chops
Link?

~~~
ErrantX
Err the TC article...

"Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been
able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it
is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine
that it is absolutely false either."

Is his last word on the matter. Essentially he is saying they have denied it
but his "rumor" may even still be true.

That smacks of a lie somewhere along the line to me (and as it is my job to
find lies I suspect it is the case). :)

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-
ov...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-
listening-data-to-the-riaa/#comment-2632012)

------
peregrine
Why does this story have such a longer Front Page Life?

------
uuilly
Did he mean to say "Techcruch are full of shit" instead of "Techcrunch is full
of shit?" Is there an inside joke I'm missing?

~~~
lacker
In British English company names act as plural nouns.

~~~
pg
I usually do this, and editors always want to change it. I never realized it
was an English thing.

~~~
electromagnetic
I have the same problem, I just don't approve of 'style' when it comes to
writing. There are lots of personal style and it does amazing, but there are
company style guides and printing houses all have different ones.

I have a serious problem using '...' in writing unless it's from the person's
mouth. I always learnt if someone says something directly to you then use
'...' and if it comes indirect you use "..." so all novels should use "..."
because it's fiction and was never said. Yet so many printing houses have gone
away from using "..." and have switched to using the quotation form '...'.

I'm unsure why I get worked up over this, I guess I just think it's stupid so
few people have control over how the masses perceive the English language.
This is a prime example, in the US most institutions use 'is' in this
situation, to such a degree that 'are' looks bizarre and the opposite happened
in the UK.

The same is with 'ise' and 'ize'. Using 'ize' is so prevalent in the US that
in many words the letter S is being supplanted with Z in situations it's not
supposed to be. The prime example is how analyse is incorrectly spelled (even
in spell checkers) as analyze and I'm sorry but it is technically correct to
substitute the suffix 'ise' for 'ize', however analyse is a complete word
without suffix, it's not discussing anal.

~~~
bonaldi
Style is not a matter of control, it's a matter of consistency. There are
many, many areas in English where there is no clear rule as to what's "right",
so to ensure consistency style guides make explicit what a given publication
will do in that instance. Numerals for example, are often written out one
through nine, but digits after that. Others will always use digits. Neither is
"right", but consistency matters.

As for the quotes, I suspect you'll need to unlearn that rule. I'm not even
sure how you got there, except perhaps by misunderstanding the rules for
nested quotations, Eg:

"She was absolutely furious, she shouted, 'I hate you' and then ran off," said
John

(If it helps any US readers to understand the British usage of plurals, think
about the police. You wouldn't write "Police says it has arrested two
suspects, but it is still hunting for two more", right? That dissonance is
exactly the same as how US usage of the singular, particularly when it comes
to music groups -- "U2 says it will tour in the fall" -- sounds to Brits. )

~~~
maxwell
The diff seems to be that Americans take a group's name as a synecdoche while
Brits apparently think of it as a plural noun.

Would the British rendition be "U2 say it will" or "U2 say they will"?

------
tmilewski
I really want to see what Techcrunch says.

While this is terribly unprofessional, Techcruch had it coming to them.

~~~
giles_bowkett
like most people who post here you need to read Paul Graham's early work.
professionalism is harmful to quality of work and especially so in startups.
professionalism is an artifact of the industrial revolution and is not
relevant in all fields. computer programming is to some degree post-industrial
and professionalism is irrelevant and archaic for many programmers.
criticizing a programmer for being unprofessional is like criticizing him or
her for not being well acquainted with the phases of the moon and the effect
those phases have on that programmer's crops.

~~~
ErrantX
rubbish. it is easily possible to be professional and produce excellent work.
it doesnt have to be stuffy and haughty that's all :)

(and yeh I read his early stuff: not a fan. At every stage in a startup you
have to get to a stage where you need to show some professional gloss to prove
your not just another backroom programmer - IMO it is the core reason why a
lot fail, they cling slavishly to that "fun guy" image and lose corporate
custom because of it ;))

@the previous poster: I wouldnt call it unprofessional per se. Empassioned
perhaps :D

sorry for the OT :)

------
josefresco
And just like that, there's a whole new audience for TechCrunch that never
existed.

"Thanks Last.fm for all the free PR" Sincerely, M.A.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Except that this Last.FM post is currently the number 3 result in Google for
"TechCrunch", with its title prominently displayed.

Oops.

~~~
Harkins
That's just Google giving prominent placement to something they see as
breaking news. It'll disappear in a week or so, then reappear somewhere much
lower in a few more weeks as it's normally indexed by their crawler picking up
links and rebuilding its graph.

------
pramit
Techcrunch tried but couldn't become the Red Herring of web 2.0. Nowhere near.

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giles_bowkett
there you have it in a nutshell

