Oh, before I begin, let me just say that I’m completely open to the fact that I could be dead wrong with any of my thoughts below. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct my thinking in the comments section.

TechCrunch doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot “digging” lately.  It seems like, for a lack of a better way to put it, the TechCrunch editors need to be spoon fed stories rather than them hunting them down and finding them.

Maybe the volume of submissions that they get is such that they simply do not have time to go out and find any other stories.  Or, maybe the fault lies on me, for not continuously emailing the editors or driving to their office and barging in, demanding that they cover various things going on at Viddler.

Or maybe they’re just like me. They only have 24 hours in a day and they need to focus on what does them the most good. Maybe they only cover Twitter, Yahoo!, and many other Silicon Valley-based companies because they’re far more interesting to their audience than Viddler’s new customizable player.

It could be that since I failed to go out and tell them about Viddler’s API, our business-to-business Web services, or our Vidgets – that they would have never known about them otherwise.

Let me be clear; I certainly don’t feel shunned by anyone at TechCrunch.  In fact, all of my dealings with everyone there (past and present) has always been great.  They’ve covered Viddler’s launch, and embedded our player on many occassion.  They just don’t seem to be paying attention to some of the things happening over here on the east coast, and I’m wondering what we might be doing wrong.

Some have commented to me; “So long as your users know what is going on, you shouldn’t worry about the TechCrunch audience.”  In some ways I agree with that statement, but we want everyone to know how great Viddler’s services are maturing to be – and we think that those that read TechCrunch deserve to know as much as Center Network’s readers.

I have seen many discussions about TechCrunch and its editors, good, bad, and downright ugly – I hope this post doesn’t come across as anything other than me being honest.  I want the entire world to know about Viddler, and I believe TechCrunch to be an excellent technology blog/online magazine that could be instrumental in helping us achieve that goal.  It just isn’t doing so right now.

Hey TechCrunch! Put Viddler on your radar. Please?

(The above post also relates to any one or any company that covers the technology space. Let me know of other outlets that should be covering Viddler that aren’t and I’ll try to contact them.)

But then she throws in two quotes from people in the area (no doubt to give her article a little feeling) and this was one of them.

“”It sounds like a good idea but at the same time I don’t know if the plane could hit and maybe the nose could hit the ground and the whole thing could explode,” commented Dallas resident Tom Rechtin.”

The other quote she threw in was actually pretty good.  The person remarked how the system sounded good and was all for increasing the safety of the airport.  But then this guy, out of nowhere and having no engineering experience, just says out of the blue that he hopes the system wouldn’t make a plane completely explode.

Sometimes in articles such as this reporters will try to throw in two contradicting opinions in order to give the piece some balance.  This makes complete sense, of course, when the two opinions make sense or are from people that have some sort of experience with what the piece is dealing with.

Sarah, all I’m saying is that I think you could have found a better quote.  In fact, here’s one for you from me, Colin Devroe, on what I think of the new system having not seen it and having zero experience in aviation and the airport industry as a whole beyond flying on a few planes.

“If the system cost ten times as much and only saved one life, it’d still be worth it.”

If you’re going to quote morons, it might as well be this moron.  Now I think I’m going to dig up a few other articles she’s written.  If only the site made that easy.

First, he speaks about Michael Arrington’s crack at Blaine Cook of Twitter.  In short, Arrington puts a lot of blame on Cook for Twitter’s stability issues and then some “experts” reply in the comments.  Then, he talks about some of the opinions being spewed out about WordPress and its supposed downfalls as it pertains to scalability.

Lin is much more versed in the technology, especially the infrastructure, behind-the-scenes in both of these cases than I am – so I will not be offering my opinions here and ask that you read his.  Also, I will not be linking to the other sources of this story, because I’d rather you read them with his context.

Side note about this link: I found this article through Matt Mullengweg who wrote and published a post called Armchair Scaling Experts which has been taken down since and I don’t know why.

Source: random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition.

[tags]journalism, john gruber, daringfireball, macintosh, viruses, virus, windows, microsoft, apple[/tags]