We’ve gotten our hands on three free passes to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on April 15-18, valued at $1,500 each. We traded these passes for excess advertising inventory on our sites, and our plan is to give them away to readers.
I want to have some fun with giving these out. Last year we gave away a free pass to SXSW to the reader who had the best reason for going, but it turned out to be a massive competition for the biggest sob story. It was depressing.
So for the Web 2.0 Expo, we’re going to do something a little different. I want you to tell me how much we (occasionally) suck. Sometimes our predictions are, with the benefit of hindsight, way off. Or they had no logical basis to begin with. Or perhaps we got some crucial fact wrong. Whatever it is, I want you to dig out the worst post in TechCrunch history and write about why it’s so bad. A good place to start is our Company Index.
Here are the rules: You can attack any post published on TechCrunch (not MobileCrunch, CrunchGear or any of our other sites). But you can’t personally attack the writer unless it’s me (Michael Arrington). Points will be given for originality, creativity and humor, but deducted for outright and unsupported meanness and/or ad hominem attacks. The best entries, in my opinion, will be the ones that find us stating a one-sided opinion about the future of a startup or market segment that turned out to be flat out wrong.
To enter, you need to write your entry on your blog and either successfully trackback to this post or add a link in the comments to what you’ve written. If you don’t have a blog, I recommend starting one at Wordpress, Vox or Blogger. It only takes a minute to set up, and hopefully this will be the first of many interesting blog posts that you write.
We’ll pick the top ten or so entries and then let readers vote for the three winners. Entries must be written and added to the trackbacks or comments below by noon PST on Saturday, April 7 (comments and trackbacks will be turned off at that time). The voting will start on Monday, April 9 and go for 48 hours.
While this is mostly for fun, I’ll be reading every entry carefully and pulling out as much constructive criticism as possible. This will be a painful, but useful, way to become a better writer.
Update: Wow, I regret this already. Even our former writer Marshall Kirkpatrick is piling on.





VC Dan: For someone who spends so much time shilling for PayPerPost, how the hell do you also find the time to troll TechCrunch? Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, working or something? After your spectacularly bad track record at Draper Atlantic, one would think you would focus on evaluating your investments instead of attacking random bloggers.
How is anyone who is unable to distinguish between a contest and a salary allowed anywhere near money?
VC Dan is really killing the fun of the contest here when this article is probably more geared for him:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....urs-humor/
I still can’t believe I didn’t even get a laugh at my comment:-
“Michael I accept the apology re swearing and 7 year olds.
Only thing is my son now associates graffiti with fuckedcompany.com as in “Dad, is that their website advertised on the wall?””
Surely I must now win? Oh well, back to blogs!
yeah, vc dan, I retract. you aren’t dumb, you’re evil. all this smoke creation draws attention from the real damage PPP is doing.
Thanks for the retraction Michael. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter whether you insult my intelligence or call me evil. I’ve always worked hard in the trenches for the entrepreneurs I back and always will.
I’ll take your avoidance of the question not once, but three times, as an admission. Enjoy your sponsored blogging promotion, I like it and think it will deliver a nice ROI for you and fun for the bloggers. Next time you might try PPP for helping manage the entries (instead of trying to coordinate via comments/trackbacks) and to require consistent conflict disclosure. I’m sure we could arrange something…
See here: http://yairharel.wordpress.com.....echcrunch/
Dan, my refusal to address your question is an admission of nothing. I simply will not play your game, in which you try to muddy the water enough to convince people that PPP is a reasonable business model. Yes, you fight for your companies. But the fact that you would back a company like PPP tells me that you are not an ethical person.
Ok, I didn’t bash you that much, but i have a few good tips, let’s see if I get the colder shoulder again.
http://blog.domaintools.com/20.....he-basics/
I don’t know if my trackback not showing up means it got flagged as spam, so here’s a link to my post…jerks.
http://www.areyouwatchingthis......lying-car/
Just FYI, we’re shutting off comments now.