I dont like the implication that techcrunch and last.fm are both equally innocent victims in this.
techcrunch's traffic no doubt rose well above average during the whole affair, they have a few detractors questioning their legitimacy, but where are they? techcrunch deleted every comment that wasnt calling for the death of last.fm from each post.
whereas last.fm, they may have had some extra traffic, but they have had quite a few people deleting accounts, 3 posts on the worlds largest(?) tech blog along with threads on slashdot and a long list of people in their own forum worrying about being sued for using last.fm.
combine that with the ridiculous practice of posting these attacks on friday nights and the fact that techcrunch were the only people to hear from this tipster, its hard to pass off techcrunch as the innocent victim.
When you have a scoop, you publish it. You don't think: "oh well, it's getting late on Friday, let's wait until Monday when every other news media outlet has a chance to cover this as well".
So the "Friday allegation", to me, is completely misguided.
The denials have been pretty suspicious actually, at least the way TechCrunch and the Guardian report them. Over the years, I got used to reading between the lines.
When a famous athlete says "the allegations about my doping in magazine XYZ are completely false", it's not a denial. It's a carefully crafted statement to avoid any legal problems. If the athlete says "I never took drug XYZ", then that's a much stronger statement.
In geek terms, the first statement is a "nop". The second one is either true or false (0 or 1).
Well the thing that got me was there was an assertion in the email that the last.fm employee was concerned about how not handing over the data would affect their rates - which sounded like the data could possibly be have handed directly to one of the record companies in question, which then found its way into the hands of the RIAA.
So, in that respect, CBS's simple denial stating that they never handed data over to the RIAA is accurate - because they worded it that way, that doesn't mean that they didn't know that that the data ended up in the hands of the RIAA.
So to visualise it, it would look like.
last.fm > cbs > record label > riaa
That way, all of the denials by last.fm and CBS would be "true" and yet, the TC story would still be fundamentally "accurate".
(EDIT - This is just speculation on my part from all of the information I've read. I'd have to side with TC because I doubt TC would publish several stories on the matter, months apart, if there wasn't even a hint of truth to the matter. I'd definitely trust the credibility of Arrington anyday over that of your average PR representative.)
Sure, you publish a scoop when it's about 'OMG, COULD THIS BE A SNEAK PEEK OF GOOGLE NUCLEAR?!' You don't publish a scoop that could potentially cause quite a bit of damage to a company's image, resulting in a potential loss of business. That's not to say TC/last.fm are right or wrong, but you've got to, for at least a second, think about the implications of what you're going to publish, regardless of wanting to be the first to cover a story.
* Last.fm has never given data linking IP addresses and scrobbles to any third party.
* Last.fm has never given data linking IP addresses and scrobbles to CBS (who, by the way, we don't consider a third party, but who do have to uphold our privacy policy).
considering he hadnt been asked to respond before the article was published, and posted that within a few hours of the article going live, i mean, what more can you ask for?
I doubt very much that TC deliberately posted their stories on friday night. Those guys don't distinguish between days, and I think they forget that anyone else does.
the first time fair enough but I find it hard to believe after doing it the first time, and being called out on it, That they werent remotely aware of the timing the second time round.
even if they were completely oblivious, that doesnt make it right / fair.
It follows my original point, techcrunch are wielding the ability to do serious damage to companies and the best last.fm can hope for is damage limitation, no matter if they are completely in the right.
I agree. It's a pretty weak argument to imply that Arrington forgot there was such a thing as a weekend.
Graham's response also leaves hanging the assertion that TC is censoring unfavorable comments on their blog. If they're victims too, what are they hiding from?
You don't know Arrington. And how would TC benefit from Last.FM and/or CBS being delayed in answering them anyway?
As for deleting comments, I don't know anything about that. I never read TC comment threads because they're generally overrun with trolls. Did they kill troll posts any more aggressively on this story than on others?
yes, they deleted basically anything in favour of last.fm, looking now they left a couple around, but deleted a lot of mostly quite reasonable comments.
http://i41.tinypic.com/9ia3jo.jpg was the first screenshot I could find, the top comment defending arrington was the only one that survived, some of them are a bit confrontational, but I seen more reasonable ones deleted.
all while comments calling for last.fm to "Let it burn" are fair play.
Externally, it feels like Arrington is Darth Vader when he makes mistakes like this Last.fm one. He has power. But in person, when you abstract away the manufactured opinions you have created based on his writing, you realize he's just another startup founder. A smart, interesting one. His startup just happens to be TechCrunch. I think lots of people, for some reason, forget that.
I like Arrington a lot. He knows how to play the game in his industry, and that's why he's successful. You can't really blame him for that, from an entrepreneurial point of view (despite the moral implications). Every startup founder needs to know how to play their game. Plenty of YC companies have done questionably moral things to gain traffic/attention.
That doesn't justify TechCrunch's gossip posts, but it provides me with a satisfactory rationalization for the behavior.
I don't have an Arrington problem. I will probably never meet him. I could care less if he's a jerk.
What I have is a future-of-trade-journalism problem. Specifically:
* There's no apparent separation of editorial and reporting at TC.
* There's no apparent rules about sourcing and attribution at TC.
* There's no corrections policy at TC.
Long story short, it's a blog. But people like us, acting en masse, have imbued it with many times the power of a real trade press outlet. Of course TC can get more done more cheaply than ZD. They don't play by the same rules.
If TC wants to be taken seriously as a source of information, then TC has to start getting the fundamentals of reporting. The Friday thing is one of these; requesting comment from the subject of your story is another.
Without attention to these details, TC will be (and will deserve to be) seen as nothing more than a gossip rag. Of course, if that's what they want...
I would only say that I can't imagine that Last.fm lost any users due to the TC story. The intersection of the users of Last.fm and those that would read, believe and act on this TC story are probably pretty scant.
That said, this recap in the guardian is pretty lame. What's with finding it so awful that last.fm doesn't have dedicated PR staff. It's not so terrible to let engineers talk with non-engineers.
besides if you wanted to check the stats it would need to be on a per article basis, theres too much traffic to try and extrapolate trends on a month by month basis.
to be fair it was a guess, but I would still be surprised if they werent among the most popular articles.
- TC originally explicitly accused Last of handing over the data. Which everyone agrees now didnt happen. So probably Last's original "TC are full of shit" response could be considered partially fair?
- This "source" has just disappeared? That's interesting... not wanting to sound like I am accusing TC but it's more than a tad suspicious. Has someome been leading them along? Sounds a bit like it to me!
The truth is that "there's no story". Because somebody (everybody?) is stonewalling.
Paul Carr provides a good summary of what (impaired) journalistic-like investigation has been done so far.
I don't follow Carr, but glanced around the guardian.co.uk page and noticed that the 3rd "most followed stories" was, "Woman may have kept mother's body in freezer for 20 years." Ah. Well, I guess Guardian is not exactly targeting HN readers.
The Guardian is one of the UK's biggest newspapers, and is generally known for being tech savvy. This is a decent "elevator pitch" summing up of the story for the Guardian's typical audience.
The Guardian is a good source and certainly understand tech the best of UK newspapers (they have an api, post the raw data used in articles, host barcamps/hackdays, etc).
Incidentally, in this same column, Carr linked to an earlier piece - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/28/not-safe-fo... - where he basically apologized for trashing Le Web, and bemoaned the culture of schadenfreude and cynicism that causes his negative columns to be more popular than his positive ones.
That piece Carr wrote about Le Web was a hack job -- yet another manifestation of the undying British national habit of badmouthing the French on every possible occasion.
Done by professional comedians once in a while it's fun. Done by an entire nation it's disgusting.
Compared to Carr's, Michael Arrington's article on Le Web seemed like a balanced critique, and that's saying something.
What baffles me is how incredibly incompetent the PR operation of CBS is. This is after all one of the biggest media companies in the world.
Instead of issuing an unequivocal joint CBS+Last denial, they keep stressing how unimportant a source blogs are. This isn't just a matter of truth but also one of professionalism. It's yet more evidence that media companies have been living under a stone for many years and any startup should avoid ending up in the claws of one of those.
Great post? He basically said, "He said, she said, he said again, she said again and we don't don't know what happened." Which is what everyone already knew.
techcrunch's traffic no doubt rose well above average during the whole affair, they have a few detractors questioning their legitimacy, but where are they? techcrunch deleted every comment that wasnt calling for the death of last.fm from each post.
whereas last.fm, they may have had some extra traffic, but they have had quite a few people deleting accounts, 3 posts on the worlds largest(?) tech blog along with threads on slashdot and a long list of people in their own forum worrying about being sued for using last.fm.
combine that with the ridiculous practice of posting these attacks on friday nights and the fact that techcrunch were the only people to hear from this tipster, its hard to pass off techcrunch as the innocent victim.