Sure. (Photo: Hashgram)

As HBO drums up promotion of the upcoming season of Games of Thrones, the premium cable network is trying a different approach: cozying up with the digerati. (Historically, HBO has greeted the Internet much Night's Watch would approach a horde of White Walkers.)

Last week, the cabler held elaborate Games of Thrones-themed events in techie hotspots like Silicon Valley and Seattle--home base to Internet giants like Amazon, Google, Netflix prone to disrupting the archaic television distribution process.

The Los Angeles Times described the crowd at the party as a sea of t-shirts adorned with Twitter logos, with plenty of Google Glass to go around. That explains why we spied tech bigwigs, like AllThingsD co-executive editor Kara Swisher and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark in attendance.

So, why is HBO trading in the glitzy red carpet premieres for neckbeard laden shindigs? Uproxx hypothesizes it sees the “writing on the wall” since its subscriber growth rate has leveled. HBO wants to make a preemptive strike to protect its yearly $3 billion revenue before it emotionally collapses, Hannah Horvath style.

According to the LA Times, all that the hobnobbing with tech companies could help HBO secure better deals on their platforms.

Analysts say HBO was looking to strengthen its alliances with an emerging new distribution network and the social media companies that help spread the popularity of its original programming.

HBO’s glacial, but inevitable, decision to offer HBOGo as a standalone product could be a good first step if it come to an agreement with those pesky cable providers. Perhaps an autograph from Mr. Dinklage could smooth the way?

SMDH (Photo: Complex)

40 Sexist Stereotypes It was not a great week for women in tech. Between the Adria Richards fracas and Complex deciding the best way to contribute to the discourse was to throw up a slideshow of the "40 Hottest Women in Tech," it's almost as if the takeaway from Sheryl Sandberg's book was Lean In... with yer boobs. The good news is that in order for the gender disparity in tech to shrink, we need to have conversations like this--even if they turn ugly or mean-spirited or upsetting.

The reaction to Ms. Richards' questionable public shaming underscored the point she’d been trying to make all along: that the tech world is often a hostile, unfriendly place for women.

So we were heartened to see a resounding backlash to the Complex slideshow. If you're gonna objectify smart, accomplished, competent women, then lean the fuck out of the Internet, thank you very much.

On his Facebook, the author of the slideshow Luke Winkie wrote a mea culpa, claiming that he recognized the negative stereotypes a story like this would perpetuate  but, "it's hard to say no to $500."

(Screencap: Facebook)

In case you think bylines like these impress women (or exes), think again:

https://twitter.com/kttykatie/status/315173787459014656

Craig of Thrones HBO threw a party for its new season of Game of Thrones in San Francisco this week, and every tech reporter under the California sun was invited. AllThingsD's Kara Swisher posted this picture of Craig Newmark and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, declaring Mr. Newmark the long lost son of Mr. Martin. Can't say we disagree.

(Photo: Instagram)

Meanwhile, HBO bigwigs get to try on Glass and we still haven't. Sigh.

(Photo: Instagram)

No Cats, No Peace Startups love office dogs. But where's the love for the official animal of the Internet, the noble cat? Betaworker Lauren Leto recently took to Twitter to plead with her colleague Paul Murphy, "Can we please get an office cat?" To support her case, she linked to AwesomeCatz.com. Mr. Murphy's response is sure to outrage the civilized world: "cats are gross.. and so is that site."

"Guys this is going to tear betaworks apart," responded Digg General Manager Jake Levine. Just imagine how rancorous the arguments over litter box responsibilities would get.

Won't Get Trolled Again We’re going to ignore this latest dispatch from King of the Trolls, Business Insider emperor Henry Blodget except to note that he finally figured out how to edit his crotch out of the shots! Proud of you, Hank.

(Photo: Tipster)

Your Name Here A Silicon Valley source had the pleasure of dining near Path cofounder Dave Morin and his wife, Brit.co founder Brit Morin recently. Mr. Morin spoke about the future of Path while Ms. Morin, a DIY enthusiast, used crayons provide by the restaurant to doodle on the paper table cloth, said the source. There were rainbows, flowers and balloons, but our favorite was a drawing of the Brit.co logo, with "Morin" written underneath and an arrow pointed towards Ms. Morin (just in case the restaurant staff didn't recognize her). That's one way to disrupt advertising, we suppose. Our tipster was kind enough to snap a pic on their way out.

Happy Internet, Mr. President Twice this week in conversation with tech types, Betabeat was asked when Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian was running for office already. The 29-year-old credited with helping to defeat SOPA/PIPA already toured the country (in a bus once leased for John McCain's  “Straight Talk Express") running for president of the Internet. But with Sheryl Sandberg hot on his heels, isn't it time to start campaigning for the real thing?

Last we heard, Mr. Ohanian was rumored to be launching his own startup reality show on MTV. However, he was recently spotted handing out awards on behalf of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who likes to call himself "the House GOP's chief watchdog."

We've reached out to Mr. Ohanian comment, but perhaps this lulzy tweet is response enough:

Lol RT @michaelpryor: I just realized why Alexis Ohanian's senate race hasn't yet begun. You have to be 30 years old to be a senator!

— Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian) March 1, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Neil Blumenthal)

Here's Looking At You, Kid Warby Parker celebrated its third birthday last night. And what better way to mark a $41.5 million funding round and potential Google Glass partnership than champagne at Grand Central Terminal. Ain't startup life grand?

Duly Noted We're starting to wonder how the geniuses at Rap Genius get any work done. The beef-starting startup promptly uploaded Andrew Mason's farewell letter and started annotating. A sampling of the notes: "Seems like Andrew has too much swag for a public company, they need to find more of a “boring loser” type…" Can't imagine why this team would be so ready to defend "swag."

VC Ben Horowitz also chimed in with a more sedate contribution, saying, "Andrew does the stand up thing and claims accountability. Make no mistake though—although he’s the only one accountable, he’s certainly not the only one responsible for all the things that went wrong." Wait, was that a dig at Eric Lefkofsky?

No Micky D's Please Worth noting: Gross slideshows about how McDonald's terrible blunders of yore perform far better, numbers-wise, than flattering slideshows about a company-funded visit to HQ.

But since McDonald's paid for airfare + hotel, not such a big deal. Also, 4 kinds of mcnugget shapes! h/t @bupbin businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-four…

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 28, 2013

Star Power Hey, what'd you do for the Oscars? Presumably you went over to a friend's house and had a couple of beers and fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence, like most of America. Well, AllThingsD grand dame and Vanity Fair contributor Kara Swisher was there. Like, Hollywood there. NBD! She tweeted Sunday, "Weird Oscars, now onto the party," complete with Insta. On another snap, she added, "Observation on first and only Hollywood party: Celebs are just like us (except prettier and more insecure)."

Snacks You know what's a really great diet, according to former Google employee Mike Dudas? Quitting Google to work somewhere else without that cafeteria. We've always heard free suckling pig goes straight to the hips.

We'll use this as an artist's rendering. (Photo: flickr.com/lac-bac)

Silicon Alley Smackdown One of the many tech events on rain delay because of Hurricane Sandy was the Big Apple Smackdown ping pong tournament, whose guest list included an impressive number of familiar names from the New York tech scene. (Betabeat is one of the media sponsors, so we may be a little biased.) Among the techno-athletes scheduled to play was Gilt Groupe CEO--and soon-to-be Gilt Groupe chairman--Kevin Ryan. Apparently, we missed quite a show.

The tournament was scheduled for Sunday, "and I played on Friday and on Sunday just to get ready for it!" Mr. Ryan told Betabeat. Really? "Oh yeah, because I won a tournament about a month ago." That was an invitation-only affair for ping pong ringers at the Hamptons manse of ABC Carpet & Home's Ken Pilot. "You had to put $100 into the pot and the winner got two-thirds of the pot, so I was pretty excited about that," Mr. Ryan enthused.

Mad that Sandy ruined your chance to see him action? You can drown your sorrows at Appular's F#@K SANDY event this coming Thursday and throw one back for a good cause.

Make It or Break It Start-Ups: Silicon Valley glamazon Kim Taylor finally has a name for her soon-to-launch startup, and being the gymnast that she is, she's named it after a move from Yelena Shushunova’s floor routine. The former NBA dancer will launch Shonova this winter, targeting the "millennial luxury fashion market," because you can never have too many websites dedicated to selling expensive clothes to young professional women.

LOLfamous Speaking of Bravo, it appears that I Can Has Cheezburger founder Ben Huh is starstruck by himself. Following the premiere of his new Bravo show, LOLwork, Mr. Huh tweeted a link to his freshly-minted IMDB profile with the caption "So...this happened." Don't let the fame get to your head!

And the techno's so loud USV ringleader and hometown hero Fred Wilson is wheels up and L.A.-bound today. However, his wife--Gotham Gal and investor-in-her-own-right Joanne Wilson--booked the tickets, and so he's not flying his preferred airline. Instead, he's flying Virgin, which is not his preferred airline and for a very specific reason: "I find flying on Virgin like going to a nightclub because of the lighting and I avoid it as a result." We always suspected Mr. Wilson was more of an indie music club kinda guy, and this cinches it.

"Executive scent" It seems that, after several years of "sifting through the crap," Team Thrillist has finally found the platonic ideal of brochandising. Behold:

Via Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer's Instagram.

So saucy Betabeat hates to clutch her collective pearls, but my goodness! Who knew the crowd at AllThingsD were quite so naughty? (Okay, we had an inkling.) Earlier this week, ATD doyenne Kara Swisher tweeted out the link to a colleague's story, which had the headline, "Meet the Man Behind Those Hot Pink Mustache Rides." Catalyst Group CEO Nick Gould immediately gave that the side-eye, noting that he "Can't help wondering if @lizgannes is aware of the off-color meaning of the term "mustache ride." Ms. Swisher didn't miss a beat: "i mean I ASSUME she is. I am." Duly noted.

Digging up history The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is kind of like mecca for tech geeks. Contained within its hallowed walls are artifacts that tell the history of computers and videogames. Among those artifacts, apparently, is a copy of Windows 1.0, originally owned by Digg founder Kevin Rose. "My copy of Windows 1.0 on display!" Mr. Rose wrote in a caption for the below photo. A nerd's dream come true.

(Photo: Instagram)

Cheryl Mills (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

A lot of startups are letting their employees work from home for the next few days because of hurricane Sandy. That's all swell news, but those members of New York's tech scene who were supposed to go out and party or sit through conferences are screwed. Tech events are getting cancelled left and right, though some scene luminaries don't seem to mind.

AllThingsD's "D: Dive Into Mobile" conference has been postponed until a later date that will be announced as soon as possible. The event had originally been set for tomorrow and Tuesday in New York City. If you booked a room at the Ritz Carlton (looking at you, VC's), the hotel is apparently giving full refunds and waiving cancellation fees. Speakers like Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy and Hillary Clinton's Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, will just have to wait until another day to make their speeches.

The Big Apple Smackdown Tourney, a ping pong tournament held at Susan Sarandon's SPIN and co-sponsored by this very blog, was postponed until further notice. Gilt's Kevin Ryan will have to wait to face off in a heady match of pong against David Tisch and AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. Ping Pong'ing with the Tech Stars sounds like a Bravo reality show just waiting to happen. Maybe the rain delay will give Andy Cohen some time to hash out that concept. The event will be postponed "until a later date."

Facebook, however, is the company shedding the most tears about Sandy. They've had to cancel two of their New York events set for this week. The first is a Tuesday engineering open house that was planned for the social networking site’s New York HQ in midtown. And, more importantly, Facebook's Gifts event--set for Thursday at FAO Schwartz--has been nixed too. According to AllThingsD, Facebook was set to use the occasion to announce partnerships for its new platform that allows users to send gifts to each other in real life.

Monday's Google event in New York has also been shut down ahead of schedule. They were expected to present the Nexus 10 tablet and an updated version of Android OS. Guess you'll just have to use your old gear through the storm and dream of the bigger and better things that will come after the skies clear.

Ms. Swisher (Photo: Google+)

If tapping Annie Leibovitz to shoot David Karp and his sidecar wasn't enough to convince you that Vanity Fair is serious about covering the tech sector as part of the power elite, how about this coup from the top of the masthead? Wired's Ryan Tate broke the news that Kara Swisher has pried herself out of Marissa Mayer's air vent to contribute part-time to the Conde Nast title, with some convincing from Graydon Carter, of course.

Mr. Tate reports that the tenacious AllThingsD cofounder agreed to "write profiles and other technology-related features," for Vanity Fair only after "overtures" from Mr. Carter. 

Negotiations with Vanity Fair are still in their infancy, so it's unclear how often the one-woman exclusive machine will be working for the title, or at what price. Ms. Swisher told Wired this was a side gig and that she has no plans to leave AllThingsD, although this should give her a hefty bargaining chip considering her News Corp. contract only goes through December 2013.

In the meantime, Ms. Swisher has given readers yet another reason to stop by a newsstand. The tech reporting veteran will be profiling Randi Zuckerberg for an upcoming issue of Harper's Bazaar, says Mr. Tate. Here's hoping Ms. Zuckerberg hasn't learned her lesson about on-the-record tequila shots just yet.

Betabeat endorses both sun and sand. (Photo: flickr.com/wheany)

Expect posting to be a little light around these parts tomorrow. Unless the Singularity happens between now and lunchtime tomorrow, our plans have room for little other than Coronas on the beach or, in the event of thunderstorms, Magic Mike.

However, Betabeat would never be so neglectful as to leave our readers without a little Instapaper fodder for your own lazy Independence Day. We've therefore rounded up a few long reads for tomorrow's downtime:

1. In which Steven Levy talks blue jeans with the Twitter cofounder: "The Many Sides of Jack Dorsey," Wired 

Once, Dorsey says with quiet awe, Morrison provided rigid, unwashed jeans to dishwashers at a New York City restaurant. They wore them constantly in the filthy steaming kitchens, creating a bewitching pattern of wear that was painstakingly replicated by Morrison’s jeansmiths.

2. Kara Swisher takes a flying leap into the digital future--in 1998: "I Cut the Cord: Our Reporter Goes Totally Wireless–And Lives to Tell About It," Wall Street Journal  

But I loved whipping out my phone on a beach to make a restaurant reservation. I adored calling friends from the Painted Desert to describe the view. Craig McCaw, the Christopher Columbus of cell phones, the man who allowed me to walk and talk and chew gum at the same time, was my idol. Was I some sort of communications freak?

3. Eulogizing the Minitel: "On the Farms of France, the Death of a Pixelated Workhorse," New York Times

Conceived in France, by the French, for the French—efforts to export the technology met with little success—the Minitel was long ago overtaken by the borderless, freewheeling Internet. It has remained in service, though, and it still has its devotees, including about 2,500 dairy farmers in Brittany who rely on it to call for the inseminator when a cow is in heat or to request that the authorities come to haul away animal carcasses.

4. Gadget lovers take a regret-filled stroll down memory lane: "Tech remorse: worst gadgets we ever bought," Ars Technica

As cute as the thing was—it came in a palette of kitchen-friendly colors that included "sunshine" and "meadow," and was sponge-cleanable—it was particularly pointless for something that cost almost as much as a real PC.

5. News you can use: "Exactly How Hot Is It? Picking the Right Weather Site for You," The Atlantic Wire

There is a whole world (wide web) of temperature- and precipitation-related sites out there. Let's put aside weather website loyalties for a moment and make sure we have the right site for our sensibilities.

Try not to bust a gut eating hotdogs or lose a hand lighting firecrackers, everybody.

Thompson. (Source: Yodel Anecdotal/Yahoo! Inc. via Wikipedia)

Rebel Yahoo shareholder Daniel Loeb's campaign to upend the leadership at Silicon Valley's most troubled old-school Internet company has succeeded. In an exclusive, Kara Swisher reports for AllThingsD that Scott Thompson is gone. Mr. Thompson's fudged resume was a keystone in the crisis that began unfolding in Yahoo's upper echelons a week ago; it appears to have been his undoing. An investigation by Yahoo into the phony computer science credential Mr. Thompson listed in public biographies revealed that the now-outgoing C.E.O. also put the degree on his resume:

[Although] Thompson made a convoluted attempt to explain it all in two awkward employee meetings at the end of last week, in which he blamed a headhunting firm for introducing the mistake when he was being hired for a job at eBay in the mid-2000 timeframe.

That company, Heidrick and Struggles, slapped back with an internal memo noting that Thompson’s claim was not “verifiably not true.” Sources said that Heidrick told Yahoo’s board that it was in possession of a resume submitted by Thompson that he had apparently submitted showing the inaccurate CS degree on it.

Yahoo is probably doubly embarrassed at this point by the way it initially tried to shrug off its head man's nebulous credentials as an "inadvertent error."

AllThingsD reports Mr. Thompson will likely be replaced by  the company's head of global media, Ross Levinsohn.

Mr. Mossberg, Ms. Swisher, and Mr. Cohen.

Last night, two journalism veterans in a very young industry took the stage at NYU for the first installment of "Inside the Internet Garage," a series of interviews wherein titans from the various corners of tech will reflect on the last 20 years of the Internet. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg have chalked up many firsts in their careers: Mr. Mossberg was one of, if not the first, mainstream columnist to write about personal technology in plain English; Ms. Swisher was the first person to tell the Wall Street Journal that it needed to launch a blog.

Moderator Aaron Cohen, an adjunct professor and the former CEO of Menupages, guided the merry pair down memory lane--and they were merry, teasing each other and their moderator. "Walt's texting me right now," Ms. Swisher announced at the start of the program.Mr. Mossberg started working at the Providence Journal as a reporter at the age of 20; Ms. Swisher was in college at Georgetown, on track to be a CIA analyst, when she got sucked into the campus newspaper. They met while covering the same beat in Washington, D.C.--specifically, AOL. Ms. Swisher was writing her book, AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web, and Mr. Mossberg was credited with writing the first mainstream, positive consumer tech review of AOL's dial-up service. (A review that, by the way, inspired the head of AOL competitor Prodigy to march into the Journal's newsroom and demand that Mr. Mossberg be fired.)

While Mr. Mossberg found a personal interest in personal tech--his first column was "How to Stop Worrying and Get the Most from Your Personal Computer"--Ms. Swisher drifted into the beat more from the business side. She was writing for the Washington Post at the time, but she wanted to go somewhere she could write about tech. Mr. Mossberg arranged for a job offer and she joined him in 1995 at the Journal, which was carving out a niche in tech thanks in no small part to Mr. Mossberg.

It wasn't long before the pair had the idea for All Things Digital, a separate website and associated conference inspired by other web-themed, crappy conferences. "We were bored out of our minds at tech conferences and tech is so exciting," Ms. Swisher said. The success of the first D conference enabled the two journalist-entrepreneurs (journopreneurs, we'll say) to shake the Journal down for their own separate blog, which became AllThingsD.

Mr. Cohen covered the history exhaustively in what ended up being an "Inside the Actor's Studio" sort of fireside chat that lasted more than 90 minutes. A couple favorite anecdotes:

-Jeff Bezos called Mr. Mossberg to ask if he should drop the ".com" from Amazon's name
-Mr. Mossberg walked Ms. Swisher down the aisle because Ms. Swisher's mother was "anti-gay, and anti-gay people have a problem with gay marriage"
-If Ms. Swisher were stranded on an island, the one web service she'd want is Twitter
-At the beginning of the program, the pair decried conflicts of interest in tech journalism, and Mr. Mossberg mouthed something at the camera. We'll know for sure when the tape comes out, but from our seats in the back it looked very much like "Pogue" [UPDATE: Mr. Mossberg says in the comments it was "Arrington."]

Mr. Cohen wrapped up talk with a string of videos from past D conferences, which have been running since 2003: Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

Before the close of the evening, Mr. Mossberg turned to the audience and wagged his finger at the entrepreneurs he supposed were sitting among the spring-loaded chairs: "Find a great partner who isn't like you!" he advised.

Nobody wants to go on the record saying negative things about TechCrunch, arguably the most powerful news blog in tech, for obvious reasons.

Entrepreneurs and investors in the startup scene tend to be very cagey when making public statements about anyone else in the same scene, with the rare exceptions of bomb-throwers and those who have succeeded past the point of caring. It's also never smart to trash-talk the hose that feeds you users.

Sources even refused to go on record with New York Times media bulldog David Carr for fear of "editorial retribution."

First, everyone's shaking in their bootstraps in fear of Mr. Arrington; now that he may have been fired, according to Fortune, hands are wringing over what will happen to the blog.

But come on, we thought. People read TechCrunch, but it's not that influential. Is it?

But TechCrunch, as the de facto trade publication in Silicon Valley, commands a special reverence. Sure, Mr. Arrington has a temper. He's notorious for taking things personally and holding a grudge--a scary prospect for young entrepreneurs who consider the blog crucial to getting exposure to the right users and validation from the right people. But the devotion stems from the fact that insiders feel that TechCrunch is important. TechCrunch gets it. TechCrunch has prestige.

Mashable, for example, writes about similar topics and has more traffic--but a Mashable hit isn't as coveted as a TechCrunch hit. Investors don't read Mashable. Your friends don't read Mashable. Same goes for the stodgy New York Times, which still refers to tweets as "Twitter messages" and "live Twitter posts."

For startups, the blog's meat and potatoes, TechCrunch is "grade AAA," said one local hacker and entrepreneur who also picks up work getting web traffic for high-end clients. "TechCrunch has always been the standard," he said. "Me and my partner would always joke around, if you ain't on TechCrunch you ain't shiiiiit. Like they say it on The Wire. You ain't on TechCrunch but you claim to be a baller in the Valley? Shiiiiiiieeeeeeeetttttt."

The fear and awe of TechCrunch is strongest for entrepreneurs who are just starting out. When hackathon baby WhoWorks.at was featured in TechCrunch, hacker John Britton got over 20,000 user signups. "TechCrunch is a force to be reckoned with," he said. BillGuard, which got to the final round at TechCrunch Disrupt, got 10,000 sign-ups in a matter of hours; another finalist, Sonar.me, got a few thousand.

Other entrepreneurs said it's about quality, not quantity. One local founder said a prominent TechCrunch post got him 2,000 users--the same as a post in TheNextWeb, and twice as many users as a post from a prominent Silicon Valley tech blogger. But it wasn't until the TechCrunch post that anyone seemed to have heard of his startup. "TechCrunch is not all-powerful in driving traffic / user acquisition," he wrote in an email. "In fact I heard Mashable is way better for user acquisition, like 3,000 top 4,000 ... [but] TechCrunch is the king for awareness."

In the early days of TechCrunch, one Silicon Valley vet told Betabeat, the comments were combed over: "People put so much import into the comments on TechCrunch ... now it's more scanning the headlines."

The blog has respect among more experienced entrepreneurs and investors as well. Top VCs read the blog or at a minimum, skim the headlines. TechCrunch is the number one source for stories that end up on TechMeme, by a wide margin: 10.57 percent of the stories on TechMeme in the last 3o days came from TechCrunch, versus 4.82 percent for runner-up AllThingsD.

Not to mention that influences gather at TechCrunch events, where luminaries meet each other and deals are made and startups are born, and a booth in Startup Alley will cost you around $10,000.

Besides being one of the best outlets for launch, TechCrunch (usually Mr. Arrington) has occasionally dipped a rake into the muck, as when he wrote a series of posts titled "Scamville," about what he felt were manipulative practices by social gaming companies like Zynga, which earn revenue from advertisers through shady lead generation. "A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey," Mr. Arrington wrote. "Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription." The stories prompted at least one user to bring a class-action lawsuit against Zynga. (She lost.)

"They've kept people honest as well and kept it real," said Shervin Pishevar, a managing director at Menlo Ventures. "TechCrunch has been an important part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Arrington and TechCrunch, they've changed lives in a very positive way. It'd be a shame to lose any of that."

But Mr. Arrington may be his own greatest threat to maintaining TechCrunch's credibility with stories like Angelgate, in which Mr. Arrington made allegations of investor collusion and pumped with controversy immediately before TechCrunch Disrupt. The piece fizzled into irrelevance after the conference. (Some skeptics have pointed out that the current Aol controversy is also hitting immediately before the conference.) A vindictive post about Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake earned him mostly disgust and bafflement. Several sources we spoke to related stories of Mr. Arrington's vendettas--making calls to try to prevent his perceived enemies from getting businesses--but also of his ability to "get over it" if it means getting a good story.

And the ongoing pay-to-play game in which entrepreneurs promise TechCrunch "exclusives" in exchange for good karma undermines Mr. Arrington's real reporting, when he gets on the phone and asks hard questions and plays inside baseball with the pros. When you regularly refer to getting the first press release for a star entrepreneur's new startup as a "scoop," the word starts to lose its impact.

Assessments of TechCrunch's pull range from "all-powerful" to "shouldn't be ignored." But most everyone agrees: any influence TechCrunch has comes from Mr. Arrington. He may have gotten the blog to the point where it can continue to exist without him, but it wouldn't be a must-read.

The dispute over Mr. Arrington's $20 million CrunchFund threatens to change the blog's coverage permanently with the institution of new rules and leadership. (Fun fact: Mr. Arrington's entry in Time's 100 Most Influential People list was written by Arianna Huffington.) The Times story alleging journalistic malfeasance led victims and beneficiaries of Mr. Arrington's influence to vocal defenses. "Everyone is getting tired of these battles between blogs, I think it's really tiresome," the Silicon Valley vet said. "I don't want to see Kara and Arrington and Henry Blodget and all these people duking it out over who got what first and it's really a bore."

Mr. Arrington is good, the defenders said. Nothing else matters.

Sounds like startup logic.

But as to whether someone like Yuri Milner reads TechCrunch daily? Sources were skeptical.

It's less important the more successful you become, other sources said. One bi-coastal entrepreneur and investor went so far as to say, "it's more influential the further outside of the industry you go."

"TechCrunch's traffic impact has decreased over the years, both from what I've observed and from what I've heard other people," said Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-VC Elias Bizannes, who has chronicled Mr. Arrington's rise to success and pontificated on the tech blogosphere on Quora. "Part of the reason for this is simply it's a more competitive landscape and TechCrunch doesn't have the monopoly on talented writers and relationships ... the reason it's been so dominant is because its bloggers are firmly entrenched in Silicon Valley, with special relationships among multiple groups that have enabled TechCrunch (and especially Mike Arrington) to break news.

"I think something more important isn't so much TechCrunch, but the aggregators like TechMeme and Hacker News. It's those curation services that drive awareness of posts, and what is construed as TechCrunch traffic actually originates from those two aggregators."

But even entrepreneurs who have "made it" can't help but care what TechCrunch writes, as when Mr. Arrington seriously irked, we heard, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey after insinuating his new startup was facilitating illegal transactions. "Founder Jack Dorsey has told me that exactly zero drug or prostitution transactions have been completed through Square. I believe he believes that, but I wonder how he really knows for sure," Mr. Arrington wrote in a thinly-sourced post last year.

It's tough to ignore when an infamous blogger tells a readership of your peers that your startup serves hookers.

We started this post wondering if TechCrunch's power is really due to the perception of TechCrunch as powerful--and whether there's effectively any difference. TechCrunch doesn't "make or break" startups, contrary to what some starry-eyed young founders believe. But despite the unfortunate names of competitors, Mr. Arrington made sure TechCrunch was the most insider-y tech news blog of them all.