Our own co-editor Erick Schonfeld is currently chatting on WatchMojo Live. He’s being interviewed by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan about the site and other random things. Watch it below.

With website URLs, one of the most common typos is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain. Huge sites where people generally type in the URL manually are usually pretty smart about it. For example, wwwgoogle.com points to Google, wwwyahoo.com points to Yahoo, and wwwmicrosoft.com points to Bing (though, interestingly, Microsoft does not own wwwbing.com, that’s a squatter). Someone pointed us to a great one of these today: wwwtwitter.com.

Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch.

Top technology advertisers are finally catching on to the fact that we are kind of obsessive here at TechCrunch in our technology coverage and so are our readers. In fact, they’re want to understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people (we do too.) To help them get a better understanding of us, we’ve constructed a quick 20-question survey that will help them get a better sense of how today’s leading start-ups and enterprises use social media, business and personal technology, and how TechCrunch influences your thinking about key strategic trends.

Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey. We’ll publish the results here on TechCrunch.

Readers are always asking us for more TMZ-style posts, so here’s one for you. The New York Post did yet another review of Ben Mezrich’s upcoming Facebook narrative, The Accidental Billionaires. That itself is not that interesting, but the Photoshopped picture the NYPost uses is fairly hilarious in its similarity to a picture from the August Capital party on Friday night after our CrunchUp event.

As you can see, NYPost wants to paint Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the kind of guy who wants to date socialite Paris Hilton. We’re not so sure. In the social networking circle, she’s old news. She’s practically Friendster. Does Mark really want to Poke former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe’s Top Friend?

Regardless, Mark can have Paris, because in the similar picture from our event, his sister Randi, gets the real prize: Michael.

Thanks again to all of you who came out to our Real Time Stream CrunchUp and August Capital Summer Party. We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capital outing. We had an amazing group of CrunchUp speakers to talk about new trends, boundaries and your passions. And we fit in 22 new product highlights from start-ups and big internet companies alike. It was a blast, and we’ve got the photos to prove it.

Here it is. The final panel discussion of our Real-Time CrunchUp conference. Judging from the participants, it should be a good one. Here’s the roster:

Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme
David Hornik, August Capital
Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
George Zachary, Charles River Ventures
Loic LeMeur, Seesmic
Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft
Craig Walker, Google
Andreas Weigend, people & data, and Stanford University
Kevin Marks, former Google
Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, TechCrunchIT (Moderator)

Find my live notes below (paraphrased):

Today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event in Redwood City, CA, Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor are kicking off the show by talking with angel investors Ron Conway and John Borthwick about the opportunity for investment in real time.

Below find some live notes (paraphrased):

Note before: Conway invested in Google at a $75 million valuation.

The last batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Once these go, the only way in is to attend our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp (which we highly recommend).

Every summer we have a party at August Capital, and it somehow seems to get more popular every year (is that possible?). Last year we preceded the party with a roundtable on the Mobile Web Wars, and this year we are doing the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. Think all day and party all night: that’s pretty much sums up our philosophy. Hope to see you at both events.

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA
Tickets: HERE

CrunchUp

Friday, July 10
9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Fox Theatre, 2223 Broadway, Redwood City
Get CrunchUp tickets for $295, which include expedited check-in to the August Capital party.

The CrunchUp final agenda is here.

Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here). We’ve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways. The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general. We’ll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.

Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning. An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes. In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away. But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more. Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business. By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation. Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.

I hope you can join us to see for yourself. Below is the (almost final) agenda:

The second batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast so grab them now. Update: This batch is sold out.

We are also selling tickets for our Real Time Stream CrunchUp earlier that day (a CrunchUp ticket includes entry to the party as well). The CrunchUp is a mini-conference exploring all aspects of the real time stream and its impact on everything from information consumption and search to media and business.

The lineup of speakers includes founders, CEOs, and top engineers from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, Salesforce, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Collecta, Qik, and more. It is amazing how much activity is going on in this area. The number of stealth companies and products that want to launch at the event alone is overwhelming, and we are working hard to fit as many of them as we can into the schedule. (More details soon).

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Additional tickets will be released over the next two weeks.

As usual, there will be lots of start-up demos, giveaways, drinks and fun. CrunchUp tickets include expedited entry to the August Capital outing.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

You might not think that we here at TechCrunch have a lot in common with the band Blink 182. But actually, we do. We both now have our own branded TweetDeck applications. You can find ours here.

TechCrunch TweetDeck users will get all the features of the normal version of TweetDeck (Twitter, Facebook, 12seconds, etc, integration), with the added bonus of the TechCrunch Column, as an option. This column features tweets from TechCrunch’s writing staff. It’s seriously riveting stuff. Why just last night, our own Robin Wauters tweeted out, “Cleaning up disks, creating backups etc. Necessary evil.”

We’ve been flooded with interest in the Real Time Stream CrunchUp to be held Friday, July 10 in conjunction with our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital (see ticket info below). Since we first announced the event two weeks ago, some major speakers have confirmed their attendance and the schedule is really starting to come together.

Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, will be on hand to share his first-hand account of how the real time stream rose to prominence so fast and where it needs to go from here. Chris Cox, the VP of product at Facebook, will have his own thoughts on the subject. And we might even stream Robert Scoble live via video from London just so that he can tell Dorsey all about FriendFeed. If Scoble needs help, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor will be there to set him straight.

We’ll kick things off with a morning discussion between two of the smartest investors focusing on real-time startups today: John Borthwick and Ron Conway. Both hold shares in Twitter, but their commitment to the real time stream goes way beyond that.

I just got word from TechCrunch editor at large Sarah Lacy, who’s currently writing very little for us while working on her new book in Rwanda. Her excuse? A “baboon attack” which is really just a baboon eating her breakfast. The fascinating video is below – I bet she could have written two posts in the time it took her to edit it, though.

Glad you and Geoff are safe, Sarah. Come home soon.

Some people use Twitter to organize street protests in Tehran. Some people use it to share their daily thoughts and observation. But it is increasingly becoming clear that one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor.

Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.

Looking at our Google Analytics numbers, here is the breakdown of visits to TechCrunch by source over the past 30 days:

The New York Times Sunday edition team picks fights like no one else. The problem is they tend to pick the wrong fights. And mask opinion pieces as straight up factual articles.

In December they wrote about Facebook revenue woes just, as it turned out, at the time that Facebook saw a huge spike in advertising dollars that will propel them to as much as $600 million in revenue this year. Then there was the Tesla article that prompted quite a response from CEO Elon Musk. That article was retitled and rewritten to correct errors and change the overall tone.

I can’t help wondering if our occasional criticism of the NYTimes prompted their most recent attack, this time aimed squarely at us. Not only does writer Damon Darlin get a lot wrong, he just absolutely failed to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face.

When Damon reached out to me by email to talk about the story, I wrote back something along the lines of “The Sunday New York Times scares the shit out of me” because of their reputation for twisting conversations to fit whatever story they’ve decided to write. But Damon persisted, saying “I want to call you about a column I am doing on different ways news organizations approach reporting rumors.” Seemed fair enough, I have lots of thoughts on that subject.

We talked for 20-30 minutes by phone. About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the article as quotations. None of the rest of our talk seemed to influence his thesis, that blogs can’t be trusted, at all.

Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.

We can’t thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party gets a little more lively, the deck gets a little more crowded, and yet David welcomes us back with unflinching enthusiasm. Thank you. We promise not to trash the place too much.

As our meet-ups have grown in popularity, we’ve expanded the format from simple mixers to timely editorial roundtables. Last year, the topic was the Mobile Web Wars just then brewing. This year, we’re taking on the real-time stream and dedicating a full day to exploring all the rivulets coming together to make it the trending topic on the Web.

We’re all glad Q1 is behind us.

Silicon Valley and the start-up ecosystem certainly was not immune to the general economic malaise. The TechCrunch sweet spot, early-stage start-ups, was particularly hurt.

The number of start-ups getting started was down 65% vs Q1 2008. We saw just 184 new start-ups formed, down from 546 in 1Q 2008.

Start-Ups Founded: January 2008 – March 2009

Source: CrunchBase

Early-stage start-ups are working hard to do more with less. The average number of staff at new start-ups founded 1Q 2009 was 6, down from 8 a year ago. How do we know? It turns out that there’s a wealth of interesting facts that we can glean from CrunchBase, our structured-wiki startup directory and primary data source for TechCrunch Research. What else did we learn from CrunchBase?

Most of you know that, following a somewhat firm request by the city of Atherton, we finally moved TechCrunch out of my house and into a great new office in the heart of downtown Palo Alto.

A few of you have been kind enough to stop by and visit and see us at work. But for those of you who haven’t stopped by, you can now see what we’re up to 24/7, thanks to Ustream. The TechCrunch cam is now up and running (or crunchcam), strategically placed at an angle to show as much of the office as possible. We’ll leave this on as often as we can, and it will double as a security camera at night. Please be patient if it goes down from time to time today, our tech team is busy duct taping the camera to an Ikea lamp that we’re using as a tripod. First class all the way here at TechCrunch.

We may install a second camera with a directional microphone to allow some limited audio. Stay tuned.

A little background for those of you who haven’t heard of the CrunchPad: This is the post that kicked off the project. I wanted something I couldn’t buy, and found people who said it could be built for a lot less than I imagined. The goal – a very thin and light touch screen computer, sans physical keyboard, that has no hard drive and boots directly to a browser to surf the web. The operating system exists solely to handle the hardware drivers and run the browser and associated applications. That’s it.

The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox. The hardware would consist of netbook appropriate chipsets (Intel Atom or Via Nano), at least a 12 inch screen, a camera for photos and video, speakers and a microphone. Add a single USB port, power in and sound out, and you’re done. If you want more features, this ain’t for you.

Price? it can be built for less than $250, including packaging. Add in fixed costs and other stuff you have to deal with (like returns), and you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business. Physical design is important, and the software is the key to winning.

We stumbled through an initial prototype that barely booted, but we finished it in a month. Prototype B was much more impressive and usable. That effort was led by Louis Monier, with software developed by Singapore-based Fusion Garage and industrial design work by by David Yarnell and Greg Lalier from Dynacept.

Anyway, we’ve continued to tinker with the project, which is referred to as Mike’s Science Project internally (or, “that thing”). But we certainly aren’t ready to talk about anything more at this point. But we did meet with Fusion Garage again today to test out the most recent prototype (B.5?). This is a significant step forward from Prototype B because the software stack is now entirely customized. The last version had a full install of Ubuntu Linux with a custom Webkit browser. This version has a bottom-up linux operating system and a new version of the browser. We also switched from Via to the Intel Atom chip. The total software footprint is around 100 MB total, which is a solid achievement. Also, this time the ID and hardware work was driven by Fusion Garage out of Singapore.

In fact, all the credit should go to Fusion Garage. But frankly we weren’t planning on talking about it at all, it just isn’t the right time yet. But, to make a long story short, someone accidentally published some photos we took to the web.

When you are introduced to new Web products and businesses every day, as we are here at TechCrunch, it is difficult not to get the startup itch. Mark Hendrickson, who has been with TechCrunch as a writer and Web developer for two years, has decided to scratch that itch and build his own Web service. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will combine location with social discovery, will have “lots of maps,” and will work with Facebook Connect. It will be a while before he is ready to launch it, but if you are curious you can sign up for the waiting list to receive an invite. Or you can follow him on Twitter.

Mark has been a key member of TechCrunch, and he will be sorely missed. Most of our readers know him primarily as one of our more analytical writers. His first post was a side-by-side comparison of different DIY social networks, he’s been a key chronicler of changes at Facebook, and helped us realize that Hulu doesn’t suck.

But beyond writing great posts, Mark is one of the people who has kept TechCrunch humming behind the scenes. Michael and I kept trying to get him to write—and we squeezed 569 posts out of him—but really all Mark wanted to do was Web development. From TechCrunch to CrunchBase to Elevator Pitches, Mark’s hand has touched practically every Web property we operate.