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%

In a post on TechCrunch about bloggers raising money, Michael Arrington urges these bloggers to forgo raising money in favor of banding together and crushing a medium-size media company by somehow attaining less than half it’s revenue:

Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business. . . . What I’d like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Mens Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

This vision is on a weird borderline between crazy and unambitious. It’s unambitious, because if you want to crush a web media company, why pick CNET? There are far larger companies you could shoot to surpass. It’s a little crazy, because it depends upon combining a large number of blogs (and, more importantly, bloggers) together. Just ignoring the potential audience overlap, doing all of those deals is going to be very, very hard. And, at the end, you still are half the size of CNET, assuming CNET doesn’t grow. Personally, I think Henry Blodgett’s comments are right on target. After expressing interest in the idea, he notes that “we would secretly hope that we could find more interesting things to do” than killing CNET.

So, Michael, if you are going to dream of world domination, pick a bigger world!

I need to buy a new laptop, so Mark Evan’s post on Are MacBooks Just Trendy? really resonated with me. I think the answer is yes they are trendy, but also they are good.

It is great sadness that I learned today that Russell Shaw has died. Russell was a talented writer, and a blogger for ZDNet. May he rest in peace. Here are some other reactions to Russell’s death:

Dan Farber

Dan York

Andy Abramson

UPDATE: Here’s the ZDNet Post from Larry: Rest in peace Russell Shaw; We’ll miss you.

On March 17th, in Mountain View, it’s Mashup Camp. I’ve known David Berlind (the organizer of Mashup Camp) for many years. We both worked together at ZDNet where David was a blogger superstar, and I’m still in charge of engineering.   I even modestly contributed to the success of Mashup Camp by setting up the wiki for it. Now, David had moved on to CMP, and the event has gone with him. It’s still a great event, though, and a must for serious web developers. If you are interested in mashups at all,  and you ought to be, you should attend. I will be, and I’ll be blogging about it also.

In a sign that the Web 2.0 bubble may be about to burst, people are actually starting to ask startups how they intend to make money? One of the first victims: Wordpress.com. In this blog post, Matt is called out for opposing advertising, and he is asked how then, Automattic will ever make money? We can expect a lot more of these kind of questions going forward in 2008.

Three sentence version: Hey, Ruby on Rails is cool. The guys who invented it are so arrogant and cool. And, they don’t care if you don’t like it. If you really want, you can read the original here.

Hey, if you are a PHP coder who is looking to work at a hot startup, check out these jobs at OpenDNS. This is a great company that provides a really great service.

I never thought that I would ever say this, but Dan Farber is wrong and the New York Times and Henry Blodgett are right. Microsoft has wasted billions of dollars, and many years, trying to succeed on the web. Buying Yahoo won’t help them get better. Instead, as Blodget writes, they should swap their internet division for a stake in a combined web company, and concentrate on the enterprise market. Yahoo won’t fit into Microsoft, but a combined unit could be a competitor for Google.

UPDATE: Scavo thinks buying SAP would be a mistake. He’s probably right, but I still say it is a smaller mistake than buying Yahoo.

If you are a blogger, and want to get a real idea of your significance, then add that Feedburner badge that shows the number of your RSS subscribers to your blog. My ego really took a hit when I went from 8 subscribers to 6. It’s going to be tough to recover.