It would be very easy to poke fun at the shenanigans going on at AOL owned Huffington Post led Techcrunch.
Techcrunch is generally a good read with a great degree of attitude. Perhaps it is a sign of the maturity of the web or just a small window into our web based corporate culture(s). Yes it looks like in this war - no matter who started it - the suits win again.
For clarity - I think of myself more as a contributor rather than a suit - but in reality I have to be a suit a lot of the time.
The web is supposed to be open, wild and free. That's the good news. The bad news is that these concepts don't necessarily sit well together.
The web based economy has effectively destroyed a significant part of the non-physical economy. From banking to personal relationships to our little world of travel. The resulting models are very different from what many of us (Boomers - sic) grew up with.
And we have folks like Arrington to thank for some of the good and the bad of what has happened. We need people like him and we need independent organs (I struggle with the term blog or journal) to act as the fourth estate of the web.
However it plays out - as a soap opera I suspect, this will have the effect of changing the psyche of the web based economy. While the world will carry on without Arrington at the helm of Techcrunch - the likelihood is that it will have lost some of the veneer of adolescence. Yes the web is growing up. I guess we have to now as well...
Cheers
