The Ghost of Michael Arrington Past

There's some fun stuff in TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington's old personal blog, which he published for eight months in 2005 before becoming the Ron Popeil of Web 2.0.

A Nov. 12, 2005, entry in which he raises a little capital:

Selling my copy of The Search by John Battelle. $10 obo.

An Aug. 1, 2005, post declaring that he has deleted his PayPal account and would no longer be selling items on EBay:

I broke up with PayPal today, using their handy 12-step account termination procedure. I won't go into the details, but they abused me to the point where I simply could not do business with them any longer. The core issue wasn't that big of a deal, but their customer service at first ignored me for weeks, then re-defined "condescension" to a near Platonian perfection. Sadly, this means my ebay purchases and sales have ceased

An Oct. 8, 2005, item giddy over TechCrunch being named one of the top 100 tech blogs by CNET:

I found out last night when I got home from a conference and was totally excited and overwhelmed. I'm extremely happy about this.

Today, Arrington frequently rages against CNET, once writing that it represents "everything that we bloggers are trying to kill." (Speak for yourself, dude: The only thing I'm trying to kill is the designated hitter.)

Arrington tells interviewers his goal is to beat CNET, which even by his claim of $200,000 monthly revenue is a lofty goal. CNET's a publicly traded media corporation with a market cap of $1.1 billion and $387 million in revenue last year. By comparison, Arrington fielded an offer to buy TechCrunch for $8.5 million, according to Wired.

Business · 2007/08/13 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Comments

Will someone read this blog some day thinking wow rogers cadenhead was a real prick before he became a super nice guy.

#1 · Fred Rogers · 2007/08/15