What's Up, Mike? A Brief Talk with TechCrunch's Editor
Posted by: Rob Hof on August 11, 2006
Mike Arrington’s new CrunchGear blog won’t be the end of his ambitions. Mike told me he’s planning two more blogs in the next month, starting with gaming, probably by acquisition. That’s on top of flagship TechCrunch, as well as MobileCrunch, CrunchTalk, Crunchnotes, and the recent Crunchboard job site.
What’s up with all this? A blogging empire? Well, Mike doesn’t put it that way, but it kinda sounds like it. His goal is to have 10 to 15 of them in his network. In fact, he says he hopes to create a sort of “distributed CNET,” especially if a lot of other blogs in this increasingly crowded space hit the wall. “I’m hoping everything crashes,” he says. “Then I want to go buy all the big blogs.”
Regardless of if or when that happens, he’s aiming to have the No. 1 blog in each category—a tall order, given the dominance of blogs like Gizmodo, more generalized job sites like Monster, blooming podcast sites, and so on. He thinks that for now, it’s less a competition than an ecosystem, but even an ecosystem can support only so much flora and fauna. Nonetheless, this is one ecosystem worth watching.
