Capital Chaos

             VS.              

As many of you may already know, a fierce battle has erupted between Valleywag (Owen Thomas) and TechCrunch (Michael Arrington).  While I am not too familiar with the inner reasons as to how this feud started, I must say it is quite intriguing to watch and I am not the only one.  In the past week alone, Valleywag’s traffic has spiked significantly from the latest news of both Arrington’s love life (or lack thereof) and the scoop on how Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) ditched his girlfriend Rachel Marsden using Wiki - beyond lame.

On the surface, it seems like Valleywag is just trying to add some humor to the high stressed area we call the “Valley” and I think part of the problem is that the insulated world is starting to become a victim of its own successes.  These guys develop this technology and these platforms and seemingly are taking them a bit too far - so much so that they are getting a dose of their own medicine.

So when Arrington decided to take an at-home DNA test and then put the results out there (maybe as a matchmaking tool?) someone decided to post asking for not just his DNA results but his DNA as well.  Then Valleywag gave us all an insight into Arrington’s latest breakup with Meghan Asha (who is some heiress to Sun Microsystems - I wish I knew what the hell an heiress to Sun is) and it seems the breakup wasnt quite amicable since Asha purchsed the domain, whoisyourarrington.com.  So maybe Arrington took the test after his breakup with the Heiress. 

So now the Valley finally has something meaningful to discuss instead of valuations, Google’s stock, Facebook scrabble and who is going to SXSW.  The problem is Arrington is taking himself way too seriously and getting all Politico and it seems like the site has changed a bit too - although still very informative.  As for Valleywag, my forecast is going to be that you will start seeing more of these types of sites pop up and now with Google Whatever, you will probably get pics to follow the story too. 

So this must be what they call Web 2.0.  Welcome to the new world of Tech!