Arrington's Back

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/02/back-i-am/

by bkrausz • 17 years ago

40 36 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

krav• 17 years ago

Oh goody. The web was crashing without him.

nir2• 17 years ago

Don't worry, it's being rebooted now: http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/01/microsoft-rebooted-the-web-...

metatronscube• 17 years ago

who the hell cares?!

pg5• 17 years ago

I do.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

Why?

TechCrunch - it's like choosing to read adverts.

Is your caring about TechCrunch more about the y-Combinator startups it plugs, the general state of news-blogging or interest in the content?

jeremymims• 17 years ago

I do too.

Michael isn't just any old tech journalist (although that would be fine). He's a startup founder. Tech Crunch covered startups when it wasn't popular and showed founders around the world that we weren't operating in a vacuum (all before he knew if there would ever be any money in it). The fact is he has worked his ass off writing about our industry and advocating on behalf of startups the past few years.

He's not just writing about us. He's one of us. Michael doesn't just deserve our respect, he deserves our gratitude.

Thanks Michael and welcome back!

wschroter• 17 years ago

I think it's a travesty that he was beaten down so bad by the negativity that he had to leave in the first place. This wasn't a vacation, it was a retreat - for the wrong reasons.

nlanier• 17 years ago

Obviously quite a few people, especially on Hacker News. Mr. Arrington is clearly a polarizing figure and if you wish to see him marginalized I would advise you to refrain from posting comments such as this one - It only fuels the fire.

RossM• 17 years ago

This came off to me as a boastful post, showing off that he can afford holidays in these credit-crunchy times. Is this just me or am I being grumpy again?

pg5• 17 years ago

I'm sure he'd be astonished to find that anyone thought that.

It's an interesting data point about what a minefield it is to be a public figure though. People get offended by the stuff you write, so you go off and stop writing for a month, and then they're offended that you were able to go on vacation for so long.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

You just have to deal with it. People _will_ get offended.

Being several (quite a lot of) orders of magnitude less influential than TC (and you), I try hard not to deal with it. I will invariably offend a more or less constant portion of my readership every article I write. I try to be as fair and as truthful as I can and, if that offends, say, 10% of my readers, so be it. There is nothing more I could do without compromising my own integrity.

And that is far more important than how many people I may offend.

crescendo• 17 years ago

I'm not offended by the fact that he went on a long vacation, or even that he wrote an article about it. What bugs me is that somehow it's front-page news. This article has zero content.

goodgoblin• 17 years ago

Carl Jung has a fascinating theory of archetypes - you may be familiar with it - that are unconscious processes that impact our conscious mind in ways that are subtle and difficult to detect. One manner of this effect is projection. In that case your Shadow ( a prominent archetype) projects itself onto other people and onto external events and you end up interacting with essentially yourself, even though you think you are interacting with the world. Perhaps you are projecting some aspect onto Arrington's post.

Then again, you could be just grumpy.

markessien• 17 years ago

I think it's just you. I doubt that most people are really much poorer than this time last year.

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

You are just being grumpy. The airfare to Hawaii from the bay area is less than $300 round trip. If you are going alone and want to stay in a "surf shack" style apartment, it's probably less money than renting a single room in Atherton or wherever Arrington lives. Plus the down economy means everything else is on sale. It's actually a great time to go to Hawaii IMO. (I am on vacation in Hawaii)

axod• 17 years ago

It'll be interesting to see if he addresses things like the last.fm story, and how things really went without him.

Good he's back, I think the quality of TC dropped there...

wheels2• 17 years ago

This already got killed once: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499909

time_management2• 17 years ago

He said something about being fully booked, but I offered to pay more than his usual rate and said I’d plug Surfboard House on TechCrunch (consider that a disclosure). He had (and still has) no idea what TechCrunch is, but the dollars did the trick. Schedules were juggled, I stayed.

I take "schedules were juggled" to indicate that other patrons were bumped, which would make MA a world-class shithead.

pclark• 17 years ago

why? would that make him a shithead? Surely it'd make the hotel a "shithead" or something?

The visitor that got bumped probably got a discount if he comes back in a week or two, or something.

time_management2• 17 years ago

You make a good point, which is that there might have been a discount offered or some other incentive, and the rescheduling might have been entirely voluntary on the part of the patrons. I'm not going to pass final judgment, since I clearly don't know the full story.

My observation is that many hotels aren't so kind about this sort of thing. I was once on the receiving end (sort of) of a similar situation, in Juneau, AK. It's a small city with a short tourism window, so it tends to be packed in the summer. Some rich piece of shit called up one of the major hotels and asked for half of it so he could throw a party. Patrons were booted, regardless of reservations. I wasn't in that hotel, so I wasn't directly booted, but it affected the entire city, because it was impossible to get a hotel due to all the displaced people. My girlfriend and I ended up staying in a "historic" ex-brothel hotel in a room right over a nightclub.

gcheong• 17 years ago

Now I know where I might want to stay if I ever go to Hawaii. Thanks for posting this.

mhb• 17 years ago

Hairy?

olifante• 17 years ago

Pain?

mccon104• 17 years ago

wow i have to say i'm a little astonished at the emotional (and largely negative) responses from people to Arrington simply announcing to his readers that he is back.

he wasn't trying to start a flame war. he simply let his readers know what he had done during his hiatus.

and yes this is noteworthy for the startup community. when the largest start-up related blogger (like it or not) comes back after being a month out of the game (7 months in newspaper years), it's kinda a big deal.

how is a "who the hell cares?!" comment worthy of 65 upvotes? it doesn't even pass the first 2 words in the comment guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Arrington's Back

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