The comic spectacle of Michael Arrington, the tech industry's most overbearing, self-important blogger, taking on Silicon Valley's PR apparatus, is playing out live on the Internet. Bring your popcorn.

One reason a lot of Twitterholics love Twitter is that there are no advertisements to interrupt the first-person human communication. Now TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has found a German startup, Be-A-Magpie, that offers to pay Twitterers to mix ads into their status updates. The service sends tweets from your…

With a name like SearchWiki, you know it's going to be clever, yet stupid. Google has spent ten years and I don't know how many hundred million dollars refining a rocket-science algorithm for ranking Internet search results. Now, a few Google coders have whipped up a feature that lets you boost or cut the scores of…

Halloween's on a Friday. With people already more worried about keeping their jobs than actually doing them, you might as well plan on writing the workday off. Trying to figure out a clever costume in which to pester your remaining coworkers? Valleywag has done the work for you. Print up one of these masks, designed…

How to wear it: Biz-dev blue dress shirt and pleated pants. How to scare them: Whenever someone starts talking to you, find someone more important in the room and walk away. If anyone complains, take a mental note of where they work and swear never to write about them again, unless they offer you a stake in the…

I understand it's still Tough Times, Tough Decisions month. But a layoff at TechCrunch would have been better than a post by TechCrunch's leader criticizing the site's commenters. It's a slow news morning here, too, so I'll reblog the best entry, No. 3:

Davos, baby! The partying at the World Economic Forum, the annual conference held in a Swiss resort town that has become synonymous with the event, was "out of control," organizer Klaus Schwab now admits. The Wall Street bosses and Beltway bandits were too busy having a ball to keep their eye on it, even as the…

Michael Arrington is a has-been, and he knows it. When the smoke clears after the crash and burn of the money machine behind today's tech startups, there's one word no one will ever write into a business plan again: Web 2.0. For Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog was born with the mission of tracking what he called "Web…

The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker is a handy reference tool for checking who has or hasn't done the mandatory 20% staff reduction this month. Like CrunchBase, it's a handy resource for looking up baseball stats on Web 2.0 team owners, to predict who may or may not catch the ball this time. (I saw W over the weekend. Bear…

Oh dear. Last week we told you about that actor who killed himself in Korea partly in response to some homophobic online attacks. And now, when looking at a larger trend of suicide in that country, it appears that Korea may have a dangerous internet bullying problem on their hands. The International Herald Tribune …

Mail Goggles is a Google-built version of a feature email users have joked about for decades: It makes you stop, think and pass a sobriety test before sending messages after a certain hour or on weekends. The name is a pun on Beer Goggles — but it gets the logic backwards. Somebody must have been drunk.Michael…

If you didn't believe our report that TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is in bed with MySpace's top flack, Dani Dudeck, read the obsessive startup blogger's latest story on MySpace Music, which claims that MySpace has "streamed" 1 billion songs. Considering that most MySpace profiles are set to start playing a…

The folks at Loopt managed to garner a heaping helping of positive publicity from Michael Arrington by releasing a tool allowing readers of Arrington's TechCrunch blog to stalk each other out in the real world. And not only will it help you raise all sorts of privacy concerns among perfect strangers, Arrington himself…

It's complicated. God, is it ever. The same October Details story that follows around New York's "Internet playboys" and their bicoastal hangers-on runs with this chart of who dated, funded, or hated in this overdocumented side of the Web scene. So sweet to know we're not the only ones keeping a scorecard, but one of…

We know what TechCrunch's Michael Arrington got out of sleeping with MySpace PR executive Dani Dudeck: Screenshots of MySpace Music before the service launched. But what was Dudeck's quid to Arrington's quo? To find that, it's worth examining all the nice things Arrington has posted about her employer over the past…

When TechCrunch, the blog for startup fetishists, published leaked screengrabs of MySpace's just-launched music service, Michael Arrington wrote: "We’ve been pounding our sources for screenshots of the new service for weeks without any luck." Now we know what he meant. A tipster tells us, and another source confirms,…

The anointing of Yammer as the winner of TechCrunch50 has raised questions about how the startup-launch conference operates. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, has made much of the fact that he and fellow event organizer Jason Calacanis don't charge startups to present at the show, as established rival…

Please tell me someone has pictures of Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur giving small-time technology investor Michael Arrington Segway riding lessons outside 330 Ritch for the TechCrunch50 conference's closing party. For now, I'll have to settle for Siqi Chen, left, and Alex Le, right, the guys behind Facebook widget…

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington just wants to get a scotch and hit on girls at the Seesmic party at 330 Rich, but ended up stuck in the multi-hour-long line outside the closing night party. Dutiful Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur personally came out to escort him past the velvet ropes. For a second there, people…