{"id":1294,"date":"2007-05-11T15:40:39","date_gmt":"2007-05-11T19:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/11\/techcrunch20-and-hammer-cant-touch-this\/"},"modified":"2007-05-11T15:40:39","modified_gmt":"2007-05-11T19:40:39","slug":"techcrunch20-and-hammer-cant-touch-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/11\/techcrunch20-and-hammer-cant-touch-this\/","title":{"rendered":"TechCrunch20 and Hammer: Can&#8217;t touch this"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So Mike Arrington announces some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2007\/05\/11\/techcrunch20-conference-rajeev-motwani-caterina-fake-mc-hammer-join-expert-panel\/\">new advisors<\/a> on the &#8220;panel of experts&#8221; for the TechCrunch20 conference that he and Jason Calacanis have started up as a kind of anti-DEMO conference. And the first thing that some people &#8212; like <a href=\"http:\/\/benmetcalfe.com\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/05\/11\/mc-hammer-appointed-onto-board-of-judges-for-techcrunch20\/\">Ben Metcalfe<\/a> and I, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deepjiveinterests.com\/2007\/05\/11\/mc-hammer-declared-an-expert-web20-finally-jumps-the-shark\/\">Tony Hung<\/a> at Deep Jive Interests, for example &#8212; think when we look at the list is: What the F? MC Hammer is on this panel? What&#8217;s he an expert on?<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" class=\"left\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/snipshot_e412tcwkeui4.jpg?w=525\" alt='snipshot_e412tcwkeui4.jpg' \/>Ben makes some good points, I think (points whose value is only slightly decreased by the fact that he consistently misspells the name &#8220;Michael&#8221; as &#8220;Micheal&#8221;). The Hammer &#8212; or to use his real name, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MC_Hammer\">Stanley Kirk Durell<\/a> &#8212; seems to have done very little that qualifies him for a role on a panel of Web 2.0 startup experts. Yes, he is reportedly working with a music-based startup, but is that really all it takes to get on the panel of experts? Then Nick Denton at Valleywag weighs in with <a href=\"http:\/\/valleywag.com\/tech\/techcrunch\/michael-arringtons-token-black-man-259696.php\">the &#8220;tokenism&#8221; card<\/a>, at which point Karoli <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drumsnwhistles.com\/2007\/05\/11\/valleywag-crosses-the-line\/\">lashes out<\/a> at the Wag for picking on Hammer &#8212; and then Nick and Mike take shots back and forth at each other in Karoli&#8217;s comment section. Nick says Karoli has missed the whole point, and Mike says <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drumsnwhistles.com\/2007\/05\/11\/valleywag-crosses-the-line\/#comments\">he&#8217;s race-baiting<\/a>. Is he? Who knows. But one thing occurred to me while I was reading this whole sordid tale: It would be a lot easier to argue that Hammer <i>isn&#8217;t<\/i> a token black guy if he had actually accomplished anything in the last decade that justified his presence on the panel. Just saying.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Mike Arrington announces some of the new advisors on the &#8220;panel of experts&#8221; for the TechCrunch20 conference that he and Jason Calacanis have started up as a kind of anti-DEMO conference. And the first thing that some people &#8212; like Ben Metcalfe and I, and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, for example &#8212; &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/11\/techcrunch20-and-hammer-cant-touch-this\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;TechCrunch20 and Hammer: Can&#8217;t touch this&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}