Techcrunch's Michael Arrington has been responsible, more than any other opinion leader, for the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs and investors for widgets. He's the analyst who said that Photobucket, which provides photo displays within Myspace, was cheap at 50 times trailing revenues. Google shows 6,000 mentions of widgets on the prickly editor's influential news site. So the sluggishness of Techcrunch's front page, yesterday, was particularly amusing. "TechCrunch was barely crawling this evening, due to a double slowdown from two third-party apps on the site. Stripped both out, and the site is humming. Fastest load time I've ever seen." Shame Arrington didn't realize the drag from widgets before he promoted the hell out of them to his readers.

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