All Things Digital

Another day, another tech blog eruption featuring Michael “The Volcano” Arrington of TechCrunch and, this time, Wired’s Betsy “Ain’t-Backing-Down” Schiffman.

When last we checked in with Arrington, he was elegantly telling Chris Shipley that her longstanding tech conference might want to take a dirt nap. Specifically: “Demo needs to die.”

But that’s not all!

Before that, Arrington was comparing tech blogs to gangs and contemplating bloody fights with some post-bashing tango. In it, he advised tech blogs not to raise money and talked of the importance of sector roll-ups without, oops, actually mentioning TechCrunch was both considering raising money and doing a roll-up of tech blogs.

Here’s one incredible quote from the piece: “Personally, I’ve found that if a fight is necessary, fight clean and fight hard. Make it as bloody as possible and end it fast, with no loose ends dangling about. Leave no lingering emotional stone unturned. When everyone gets up and dusts themselves off, the issue should have been resolved one way or the other, and both sides should be happy to shake hands and tango another day, even if the handshaking is done privately.”

In the latest kerfuffle, Schiffman wrote what was a minor criticism at the very end of a piece about a syndication deal that TechCrunch struck with the Washington Post (WPO).

She wrote: “We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about. But what do we know.”

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“Demo needs to die,” said TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington yesterday.

Oh, my. Oh, dear. Not more bloody tangoing!?!

The pugnacious tech blogger–who was last seen slapping around other tech bloggers who deigned to also raise money for their ventures, much as he has been doing–made this classy statement in an interview with Daniel Terdiman of CNET’s Geek Gestalt yesterday, about scheduling his TechCrunch 50 conference at the same time as the fall conference of the longtime leader in the start-up conference space, Demo, run by Chris Shipley.

(Shipley’s response is here.)

DemoFall is September 7th to the 9th, while TC 50 is September 8th through 10th.

“It’s just an old-school model,” continued Arrington to Terdiman. “It clearly involves pay to play, and what we’re offering is better.”

Not satisfied to just schedule his event at the same time as Demo–which is fine, I guess, given this is America and we all have the right to be aggressively, and even pointlessly, competitive–the second shot is at the $18,500 fee that Demo demonstrators pay, once they get invited to that conference.

TC 50 does not charge, which, to be fair, would be my choice too.

Still, given his inaugural TC 40 conference sold out and was, said Arrington to Geek Gestalt, profitable, the channeling of the Corleone Family in the online tech space seems a bit much to me.

After all, despite the fact that Arrington recently characterized tech blog sites as competing gangs (”You can do just about anything you want, but the politically savvy folks tend to arm themselves to the teeth and gang together to protect their property. Everyone else is in the middle of chaos, either fighting blindly for attention or politely asking–by linking early and linking often–if they can join the big Gang.”), let’s be honest.

The whole group of us together would lose badly in a fair fight with my son’s kindergarten class.

Of course, they bite. We should know better.

(Full disclosure: Walt Mossberg and I have been running a conference, called D: All Things Digital, for many years. D6 is in late May and is sold out. Nonetheless, full coverage of the event and also full video of the interviews with tech and media players on stage–including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bewkes, Howard Stringer, Mark Zuckerberg and many others–will be on this site. We also do a few demos, so until then, we fervently hope to find no horse heads in our beds.)

I was down in San Diego last night for the closing panel of DEMOfall, which took place after two days of wall-to-wall quickie presentations from scads of tech start-ups.

After all of them showed off their latest wares, the panelists and I were charged with telling the crowd what’s next.

Besides me, the motley crew included: Scott Sangster, director of strategic planning and development for Walt Disney Internet Group; Ed Baig, personal tech columnist of USA Today; and John Jordan, executive director of the Center for Digital Transformation at the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. The panel was moderated by John Gallant, president and editorial director of Network World.

I did a video right on stage at the event, with little snippets of the pontificating, which you can see below. I also chatted a little with DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley.

It was a lively discussion, looking at a number of trends, such as hype around social networking, still-terrible cellphone technology and also a bit about how tech is not going to necessarily help the enterprise space. Baig even talked about personal force fields and surfing the Web using your mind, which–though fanciful–was a cool idea.

One woman in the crowd was unhappy we were not more definitive about what’s coming, which was a kind of backhanded compliment, given that–in truth–none of us could actually do more than guess at what’s next.

As I noted on the panel, could anyone years ago have anticipated the weird explosion in the popularity of YouTube, except in very general terms about video getting big someday? Or what of all the hype around Facebook?

The fact of the matter is no one knows in the tech sector, as in most parts of life, what’s coming around the corner, except getting opaque glimpses now and then and confusing clues.

But if anyone is developing a personal force field, please let me know asap.

If you want to read more about the event, here is a good summary of some of the 69 companies presenting by ComputerWorld on Tuesday and yesterday. No surprise in that there was lots of social networking and video tech, with a dash of enterprise thrown in.

You can also see videos of the demos on the main DEMOfall site here.

Here’s the video: