Okay, so I thought Mike Arrington of TechCrunch had decided to take some time off to ski and hang out at his parents’ place in upstate Washington, as he described on his personal blog last month. So then who is that doing all the flaming in the comments section at TechCrunch under the name “Mike Arrington?”
As Nick Denton at Valleywag points out, the discussion of the New York Times adding social-bookmarking links to its stories — which TechCrunch described as “surrendering” to social news — degenerates into some name-calling by Mike about news consultant Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine and Rafat Ali of PaidContent, amid what appears to be some deep-seated anger at the Times (likely in part because of this).
First, Mike takes a shot at Dave Winer, saying he only supports the NYT because they adopted RSS early on (which Dave admitted in his comment). Then he says that TechCrunch is “an occasional (but always unlinked-to) source of breaking news to the NYT” and calls the newspaper an “ethically-bankrupt institution.” After a relatively mild response from Dave, Mike then says that he, Rafat and Jarvis “are sucking up to them to further your own agendas” and that this “has resulted in outright fabrications” by Rafat and Jarvis.
Then he closed the comments. Mike, I think you should hit the slopes, dude.
Update:
Rafat posts a comment at Valleywag saying he has no clue what Mike is talking about.