TechCrunch has arguably been the most influential technology blog for some time, especially for startup news and inside information.   Spawned by Silicon Valley insider Mike Arrington, TechCrunch has been a key source of news, inside information, and gossip about the Silicon Valley Startup scene.

The AOL dispute appears to have come from concerns over potential conflicts of interest by Arrington as he launches a new venture capital fund that will support companies covered by TechCrunch.

* The number of registrations of .com domain names grew from 23,662,001  in  January 2003 to 80,759,835  in January 2009.

Wiki goes on to note that a quirk in the registration rules led to a surge in the practice of “Domaintasting” where a huge bulk order of domain names would be registered for a short time.   Only the names that created click revenue from pay per click ads would be kept.    This led to new domain hosting companies set up simply to filter for marginally valuable names that could be set up to get click revenue, and then to a new rule in June 2008 from ICANN, the body that oversees domain registrations.  ICANN started to limit the number of domains that a registrar could delete in the ICANN “grace period” where no fees were charged.   These grace period deletions fell by 99.7% the following year as the practice of “domain tasting” became less profitable.

Verisign Domain Brief in June 2009 identified  92 million COM and NET domain names, 24 percent with one page websites, 64% have multipage websites and 12% have no associated websites.

These last numbers suggest to me that the speculation is not as rampant as most seem to think – ie most sites are multiple page implying content and not speculation.    Of course systems like the one I’m testing now at Godaddy that auto-generate several pages of content make it even harder to distinguish between  sites that are driven speculatively vs those that are driven more by a passion to communicate or quality initiatives.       As the quality, sharable content online increases and systems become smarter I think we may see that it will be impossible to distinguish between sites created by humans and those made automatically.

*The two day Twitter event starts Tuesday May 26th*

This is only the second WordCamp San Francisco and promises excellent insider insights from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Google’s top blogger Matt Cutts who has been using the WordPress blogging format for several years.

This is the first major Twitter conference *ever* and is sure to bring a lot of interesting people and companies to the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View.

Hope to see you there in person or here at Technology Report’s live coverage of these events.

I’m reposting Lyn’s excellent blogroll from the official CES blog at blog.ce.org. For a complete pictures you’ll need to check a lot of blogs because even the companies like Engadget and Gizmodo, each I think with 10+ people reporting here, will feature only a small fraction of all the conference action here at CES, which is really almost too massive to imagine in terms of the number of exhibits across the two convention centers.

• CNET CES 2009
• Command Information IPv6 Experts
• CONNECTIONS
• Consumer Electronics Daily News
• Dealerscope
• Dot.life
• E-gear
• Engadget
• Gadgets Blog
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Gibson Guitar Blog
• GigaOm
• Green Inc.
• Growingupgadget
• HAI Blog
• Hi Tech Gadget
• Ideal Gadget
• Intel’s Consumer Electronics Insider
• Michael Gartenberg
• Natali Del Conte
• Neat Receipts Blog
• Parks Associates Blog
• Rob Pegoraro, Faster Forward, Washington Post
• Scobleizer
• Slashdot
• Sony Electronics Blog
• Talk Back from Radio Magazine
• Techeblog
• Technology-Report.com
• The Gadget Blog
• The Jeff Pulver Blog
• Thiel Weblog
• Ubergizmo
• Veronica Belmont

Techmeme is a favorite of many in technology for pulling together technology stories and the conversations that often swirl around them.  Unlike a simple “ranking” system, TechMeme surfaces the top stories and then links out to blogs and sites that are discussing those “hot topics”.     Thus a quick review of TechMeme can give you a very fast orientation to the stories that are making their rounds in the blogs.    That does not always correspond to stories that actually *matter* to real folks, but it’s a great start.

TechMeme’s new story editor Megan has a list here of the top 10 for 2008.   Number one was the Microsoft – Yahoo aquisition saga, number two was Apple quitting MacWorld, and number three was Google Chrome.

Disclosure: Long on YHOO

“Blogger” is a new badge here at CES, given to about 200 people who registered as bloggers rather than press. However most of the bloggers here are under press badges and have been coming for some time. The early word – totally anecdotal and unofficial – from several CES and sponsor folks I had a chance to talk to include these observations:

* Bloggers are nicer than mainstream journalists.

* Bloggers more readily accept the giveaways, and thus are seen to be more subject to manipulation.

* Press people were upset that initially they could not get into the blog lounges but bloggers were allowed in Press areas. This policy was quickly changed to allow press to blogger lounges, which were very comfortable.

* Gizmodos early scathing critique of CES is already being discussed at some length by CES insiders. Hmmm – I’m noting they have toned down the coverage yet fessing up to some prankish BS. Hmmm – can all bloggers and all suits mix happily? No, all can’t but most can.

* Some big sponsors were complaining about the bloggers.

Donny Deutsch’s The Big Idea featured the Blog Bus and Robert Scoble. I have high regard for Robert’s blogging rules. He’s highly credible but recognizes that you can’t eliminate all bias from the reporting. Generally he just lays it out for folks to judge – this is a good standard though I think we should develop a blogging *disclosure* policy where you can expect others to call you out if you pander to a sponsor without disclosing relationship. I don’t like the idea of some complex “code of ethics” because I can guarantee that far too many people would just sign off and then violate the code, making the most honest folks seem the least honest)

* I’m struggling with the *ethics of blogging* issues myself. Readership here is up about 400% during the conference. Should I be extra nice to Plantronics because they gave me great lounges, work areas, lunches, and some gadgetry? Monster because they threw two great parties and were very nice about inviting me – three if you count the “after party”. SONY for the great bash at Hard Rock last night?

As I’ve pointed out many times before the line between pay to post and the nuanced “lobbyist” effects is impossible to draw clearly. I like *real journalist* Kara Swisher’s superb disclosure policy, though disclosing a lot more than most of her fellow big time journalists would do. There was a prominent tech reporter at the SONY party last night and I’m hoping to get some comments from him via email about how he treats the CES giveaways.

Ultimately I think you need to trust the person you read to keep it legitimate, but bloggers, and certainly journalists, probably should go further as Kara has and really lay things out on the line. You cannot eliminate bias in reporting – but you can … report it.

This appears to be a *superb* example of how information is reflected by the stock market and how quickly. I get the idea the (bogus) iPhone delay rumor affected the price of APPL almost immediately but have not checked the timing.

Mike at TechCrunch has a nice play by play and graph of AppleGate, and the Engadget post AppleGate post is here.

Chico the Wonder Dog has been trading places with another Chico the Wonder Dog.   That post is much older and may have more incoming links since that guy seems to spend more time posting about his dog than I do, though based on my quick analysis of this and a few other cases I think it indicates that Google looks carefully at the rate of link growth, and if it slows they tend to put back the “old, tried and true” page in favor of the newcomer. This makes sense from an anti-spam perspective although in Chicos particular case it probably does not yield the top dog.

However, the Twitter reference rising to high seems really surprising because Twitter posts are generally small and insignificant (as it is here).  I’m surprised Google ranks these at all, let alone makes them competitive with meaty postings.  Perhaps Google has elevated “social media” in some algorithmic fashion though my guess is this is a defect that will be corrected – ie Twitter is structured in a way that links to these posts from many Twitter people and this is messing up the Algo’s handing of this insignificant material.    If I’m searching for “Tesla Coil”, let along pretty much anything of any relevance, I hardly want a bunch of Twitter posts!

The focus here is broader than the Mashup Camps which were more relevant to my travel experience and where we need to go with Online Highways, but I’ve enjoyed excellent “open” presentations by Jeff Barr from Amazon and Venture Capitalists Jeff Clavier with Rick Segal who are generously offering some really key insights into the startup funding process.

Matt Mullenweg is here and it was fun to meet the creator of the superb WordPress environment.