Oh how we love to hate ‘winners’ in this country.  Small coffee company from Seattle manages to get great expansion, we all go rah-rah-rah.  They become the biggest coffee chain in America, they are evil.  Small search engine takes on Microsoft, Yahoo, and everyone cheers them on.  Great IPO, become huge.  Evil.  I don’t know why this is the trend, it probably has something to do with everyone feeling all left-out and alone back in high school and hating all the ‘cool kids’ (while desperately wanting to be one).  Personally, I think it’s a crappy attitude.  Starbucks has dramatically improved the quality of coffee overall in this country, and Google is still the best search engine around.

Looks like now the priveleges of success are turning their ugly head on Michael Arrington of TechCrunch (apparently a millionaire, although I guess I thought millionaires would dress a bit better).  And believe it or not, I’m saying to the nasty folk: “hey, quit it!”

Sure I think we’re in a big bubble, and the amount of hype going on about 2.0 stuff can be nauseating.  And yeah, I think TechCrunch contributes to that as much as the venture capitalists funding all the nuttiness.  But I think the ‘hating’ going on this weekend towards Arrington is unwarranted and I’ve decided to stick up for the guy.  Whether he likes it or not.

I saw this post (referenced here as well, albeit in a much lighter tone):

Even the great Michael Arrington, the undisputed king of rapid blog growth, has show an untter lack of imagination with his newest entry CrunchGear. This is “yet another gadget blog”, right down to its’ typical “big ass gadget picture” and the requisite Adsense engulfing the article. Say it ain’t so, Mike. Employing people in order to run Adsense ads is bound to have a burn rate, at least for awhile.

Don’t like CrunchGear? Fine with me.  I read Engadget myself, that’s my choice.  But Michael’s building a network, and if you expect to see everything be 100% original, well, you’re in fantasyland.  There just isn’t enough original stuff to blog about.  Heck, I’ve already had a few dozen emails calling me F*ckedcompany 2.0, and my little informal ‘online survey‘ shows 25% of my readers don’t really care for my content (I’m cryin’ on the inside)…

Then there’s the story over at BusinessWeek where Michael has this quite unflattering quote:

“I’m hoping everything crashes,” he says. “Then I want to go buy all the big blogs.”

Ouch.  Sounds like an out-of-context sound byte by an overeager journalist, but I could (of course) be wrong on that.  Now everyone is jumping on him.  Nick Carr is especially vehement in his post today.  ValleyWag naturally picked it up, but was a bit short on the funny for some reason (and this is the single blog that gets me laughing out loud almost every time I visit).

Guys, it’s time to take a time out.  Do I agree with everything he says?  Absolutely not.  But I don’t have to.  Does he contribute something valuable?  Absolutely.  Does he deserve his chance at success?  Absolutely.  Do I think his network worth billions?  Gosh no.  Will I continue to mock his reviews of sites that I feel are goofy (at best)?  Absolutely.  Do I wish him ill will?  Not at all (heck, I’m going to his party this week)!

Remember this: the only reason he is a target for negativity is because of his success.  The worst I’ve been called is ‘snarky‘ (is that even a word???), but that’s because I don’t have millions of readers.  I just absolutely hate to see this kind of piss-poor ‘push him up only to pull him down’ attitude.  Gets me madder than reading about Ajax-based online poker. 

Besides, without TechCrunch and Arrington, I wouldn’t have nearly as much to write about.  He’s like my muse.

So I wrote a story and linked to a story on SiliconBeat, and he linked back to me yesterday, and so you know Matt and I are practically like best buddies now.  Or, well, if we meet each other ever and like each other we might be.  But we’re virtually there.

While reading his story, I noticed the headline “Top Digg.com user going for $710 on eBay” and ignored it.  But it’s a little late now and I was rereading the story and clicked on a couple of links.  Ready for this little tidbit?

Here’s the ebay listing, currently at $710 (I’ll bet there’s some Ajax-y thing I could do to real-time reflect the bidding, but at 12:47am on 08/03/06, it’s $710, so there).  I have no problem with the Digger doing such a thing, after all, he did do the work, and if Digg is build on rewarding users through their algorithms (you know, so they don’t have to pay em or anything zany like that), then he should be able to turn that into some cash along the way.  In an uninteresting coincidence, the SiliconBeat story on the topic is something he Dugg.

At the time of writing, the $710 bidder is named payperpost.  Clicking on his ID history shows he used to be mindcometinternetproperties.  Googling “mindcomet internet properties” gets you to a company called Mind Comet (surprise).  Guess what one of their services is?  Yup, traffic building.

UPDATE 1: click here to read an interesting, but technically unrelated, discussion with Duncan Riley on ‘trackback spam’

UPDATE 2: pursuant to update 1 (see above, just under the original story.  no, down. lower. lower. too far. up.  yes, there), “I read this too“. 

About 99% of the people who are reading this (yes, you) found it due to a post I wrote late Sunday night (11 ways something something something go out of business, you know the one).  I thought it would be interesting to share with everyone exactly the impact one post had here.

• BEFORE the post, the busiest day on the site had 282 unique visitors who viewed 1218 pages (source: my server stats file, which I put at about 60% accurate).
• In the 24 hours AFTER the post, 7375 unique visitors came to the site, who viewed 28956 pages.
• BEFORE the post, my total bandwidth used was 360.23MB.
• My total 24 hours later was 1.63GB (1630MB).
• BEFORE the post, Technorati reported a total of 4 links to www.dead2o.com
• At present, there are 308 links (although oddly enough the site rank is still 1,165,144th which has me slightly higher than clownpenis.fart, but not much)
• BEFORE the post, I had never been Dugg, Reddited, or Delicioused (as far as I know)
• With the post, I was super-duper popular on them.
• BEFORE the post, I had about 60 Feedburner subscriptions.
• That shot up to over 1000 the next day. 
• BEFORE the post, the most comments and links on a single thing I wrote were about 3.
• As of the time of writing, that post is at 82.

Also, I have literally dozens of emails from entrepreneurs asking for an honest critique of their ventures.  Frankly, this is probably the most rewarding part of all this, and that to me is the most impactful part of the site popularity.

And it all tracks back to Scoble’s blog.

So what’s the point of all this?  I guess these are my takeaways:

1. People like lists.  I guess VH1 has proved that, with their 24/7 Top 20 marathons.
2. I have as many constructive things to say as I do rants, and both are fun to write.  Expect more down the road.
3. If you need traffic, getting linked to by any Top 100 blogger is probably quite helpful.
4. All stats services, including my server, Feedburner, bloglines, etc are completely unreliable.  I’m talking Nielsen unreliable.
5. Lots and lots and lots of Web 2.0 companies need a lot of practical business help.   You don’t need a guy telling you how to use Ajax to make rounded edges in your corporate blog, you need someone asking really really hard questions, and absolutely not settling for “spin” in anyway.