A while ago, Techmeme was abuzz with Michael Arrington’s plan to crush CNET. So, using the Techmeme leaderboard, I decided to look at the relative influence of the two brands. On the surface, TechCrunch is in the lead with a 7.01% presence to News.com’s 4.44%. However, if you add up all the CNET entries and compare them to the combination of TechCrunch and CrunchGear, you will see that CNET is in the lead with a 10.54% presence versus TC/CG’s 7.21%. Now, that’s still pretty good for TechCrunch, but I think it’s a good indication that CNET is nowhere near as irrelevant to conversation on the web as a lot of people like to think. For reference, here’s all the CNET properties that made the leaderboard, and their presence percentage:

• News.com 4.44%
• Webware 0.93%
• Between The Lines 0.86%
• The Social 0.71%
• Beyond Binary 0.57%
• All about Microsoft 0.56%
• Outside the Lines 0.5%
• One More Thing 0.46%
• Geek Gestalt 0.31%
• Crave 0.3%
• Googling Google 0.3%
• Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report 0.21%
• Zero Day 0.21%
• ZDNet 0.18%

and, boy are my arms tired (Sorry, couldn’t resist). Here’s all the places I visited:

• The Post House
• Club Macanudo
• Carlton Hotel

Why all these places have to use Flash on their web sites, I don’t know. I heartily recommend two out of three of them. I also ate at a great sushi place (called 28 Asian Cuisine) on 28th Street across from the Ziff Davis building. I can’t find a web site, but they’re easy to find.