John Naughton, writing in the Guardian has a good piece based on email he received from Mark Zuckerberg, forecasting the death of email. It will be replaced, if Zuck has his way, with Facebook’s new Messenger service. Naughton does a good job of refuting the self-serving prophesy, but I think there are more reason why the imminent death of email is less vision and more hallucination.

Naughhton is wrong on one point. Predicting the death of email is not new. I’ve been hearing such forecasts ever since blogging and social media started gaining momentum. Dr. Danah Boyd, the a professor at UC Berkeley researching the impact of social media on youth, made the prediction at a 2004 conference, and she built her case on the same premise that Zuckerberg uses: Young people are using less and less email.

Seven years have gone by. Many of the youth Boyd studied are now college graduates and in the workplace where I’m betting most of them now have to use email and see the wisdom of that requirement. Dr. Boyd herself is now at Microsoft Research, where I’m betting the company requires her to use email for her confidential business communications.

And that word “confidential” hits a nerve when we discuss Facebook Messenger eclipsing email. I can think of no company to trust less than Facebook with your confidential business information. Facebook has a much-noted and hopefully, long-remembered disdain for user privacy. They seem to think that if you post content there, then they own it, and they just might elect to reuse it in collaboration with advertisers.

There are other reasons that email will endure. For example:

• The archiving is better and more searchable.
• Managing and downloading attachments remain superior to Facebook
• It’s easier to review long threads that take place over lengthy periods of time
• It’s often easier to find a specific conversation in email
• With GMail, it is easier to manage and delete spam than it is in Facebook

But at the end of the day, with all the social networking we use, there is a time to communicate online in private. EMail remains an excellent choice in many, many situations, and for me, when Facebook and privacy are mentioned in the same sentence, I find myself becoming immediately uncomfortable.

I tend to avoid predictions, because the neat thing about the future is it always brings surprises when it becomes the present. But I will predict that email will outlive Facebook. Don’t get me wrong. I recognize that Facebook is the great success story of the first decade of this century.

Today the conventional wisdom is that the company is unstoppable in its attempt to transform the Web into one huge walled megalopolis called Facebook.

The tech cemeteries and old age homes are filled with other companies that held similar aspirations and positions in their times, companies that took down giants to become giants then, in turn, got taken down by some disruptive upstart that they had disdained.

Facebook is just a company. Like those before it will flourish, grow fat and old and be replaced. On the other hand email is a generic thing and in one form or another is likely to last a much longer time.

Marc Orchant was my friend. He made a single statement that may have saved Global Neighbourhoods from becoming yet another failed book project. In March 2005, Scoble and I talked our publisher, Jon Wiley into hiring Marc as our editor.

Thirty days later, Robert and I had not yet produced a single chapter to edit. In fact, we had not filed a single word. We were too busy fighting like Oscar and Felix in the Odd Couple. We disagreed on everything about the book, including the title, the language the writing process and inadvertently, we had placed Marc in between us like a ping pong ball between two paddles.

Marc called me late on a Sunday afternoon to inform me that he was resigning from the project. “You guys don’t need an editor,” he told me. “You need a marriage counsellor.” Marc’s resignation jarred Robert and I into the reality of our situation and we started collaborating in earnest. We produced a pretty good book and I told Marc that we owed him a debt of gratitude for the wake up call.

Marc died suddenly on Dec. 2, leaving a wonderful wife and two kids. I think of Marc from time-to-time, as most people remember friends who have gone, but I had no plans to share this story, until Twitter today, recommend that I follow Marc. I clicked on it, and saw that his last tweet is still in December 2009.  As I thought about it, I realized that I almost certainly still follow Marc. It shouldn’t matter because he is not posting and most of us don’t think to unfriend and unfollow people we care about when they die.

I did mention the incident on Twitter and Facebook and received several comments on people who have had similar experiences. Deb McAllister mentioned she had received a similar invite from Facebook on the first anniversary of her friend’s death.

Deb and I and other people who share similar experiences will survive the little twinges of sorrow that such macabre reminders cause. The question is why should we?

It should be a pretty simple process to take down all accounts that remain inactive for a period of time–let’s say 90 days. The social networks do not need to investigate why an account goes inactive, but if someone does not use their account for 90 days, it should be classified as inactive and not be counted.  Accounts that have gone dormant should certainly not be recommended to active users at any time for any reason.

So why doesn’t Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other socnets exercise the good taste and sensitivity to quietly de-active aging dormant accounts?

I don’t know the answer but I suspect it is headcount. There is news value and ad revenue attached to headcount. It can impact investment dollars and company valuations. For us users, such practices may be sad reminders of people who we’ve lost for some company decision makers, it can be a case of the more the merrier–or least the more lucrative.

They used to call Chicago’s election day “Resurrection Day,” because it was when the dead would rise to vote–often several times. It explains such mismatches that have Twitter claiming 200 million users, while others estimate those who are active at closer to 80 million.

It might also explain why Facebook claims the incredible number of 800 million accounts, or about one in seven people on Earth. The percentage grows higher very fast when you start deducting people who have no electricity, are illiterate, old, infirm, under the age of 10 or perhaps just, plain dead.

With Facebook’s estimates being generally regarded as true, I begin to wonder when they will have more users, than the Earth has people.

As for me, I have to admit, I’m just a bit thankful. I was reminded of someone who I really liked and how his one-liner very likely changed the course of my life while demonstrating a great example of what we would soon call a naked conversation.

A few days ago, I posted a piece about the Pepper Spray incident at UC Davis. When people saw the original video clip, they overwhelmingly supported students and felt the police had acted harshly and without justification. When I posted a longer video clip, those who commented on my blog, on Twitter and Facebook were about evenly divided on whether police actions were justified or not.

The point of my post seems to have gotten a little lost. I was calling for a need for balance in citizen-generated news content. I was emphasizing that when we see content from sources we don’t know, we need to keep an open mind on what we see.

Yesterday, an Oregon Judge ruled that Crystal L. Cox, had to fork up $2.5 million in libel damages because she was not a journalist, and therefore not protected by Oregon Shield Laws. This ruling, in my view, is hogwash. It goes against at least two previous rulings and I am reasonably certain that if Ms. Cox stops trying to defend herself in court, a decent lawyer will win her case on appeal.

Social media and traditional media is all media. Every company is now a media company and every person who posts on Facebook–or anywhere else–is now a journalist. And as has always been the case, there is a chasm of difference in the quality of reporting in the media–all of the media.

So while I think Cox deserves to be called a journalist, protected by Shield Laws, I don’t think she is a very good one. Take a second to read the post that got her into trouble. It is more name-calling than it is a report. The names that could be considered libelous are: “Thug, thief and liar.” Those terms can certainly be considered defamatory, a key issue in any libel suit. Her tone of writing seems intended to hold an executive up to public scorn, another component of libel.

In reading the Cox blog post, I am unsure whether or not what she wrote is true, and truth is the ultimate defense of libel.

In short, while I absolutely defend Cox’s right to be a journalist, I do not defend a blogger’s right to slander someone. The content is justifiably challengeable, if you ask me, whether the publisher is Crystal Cox or the NY Times.

To me this case and the Pepper Spray Videos are two closely related issues. It is self-evident that we are now the media. But what needs to evolve is that we need to behave with the same level of responsibility that professional journalists have been expected to use since long before the first blog was posted to the internet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple Computer and its steadfast, top-down policy of avoiding online conversations. As an Apple product enthusiast who spends much of most waking hours following and evangelizing social media, the issue has been a nagging thorn in my side.

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by a Hebrew language blogger/journalist about social media. I talked about the extremely cool things being done by Dell Computer, SAP, Ford Motors and IBM, when he dropped the “A question.”

“What about Apple. They don’t do anything in social media, and they are doing just great. If social media is so important why is Apple doing so well?”

Good question. I’ll try to answer below.

Simultaneously, I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s brilliantly balanced authorized biography of Steve Jobs. This is a book, the Jobs, knowing the secret that the cancer that had attacked him was going to kill him, repeatedly urged Isaacson to write a book that would remind us of all the Apple founder’s many character flaws and inform readers of some previous unknown. It puzzles me, that Mr. Command-and-Control, would authorize and encourage such a tell-it-all biography.

Now, yesterday, my friend and namesake Shel Holtz wrote a blistering condemnation of Apple Computer, for it’s lack of transparency. I agree with almost every observation that Shel makes in his broadside. Where he and I differ is that because of Apple’s refusal to join the conversation, Shel refuses to buy the company’s products.

Conversely, I swim in Apple Products. I’m currently sitting at a desk, looking at no less than six Apple products [MacbookPro, Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, iPad & iPhone 4S].  I have consistently underestimated the quality and brilliance of them. Perhaps my worst all-time call was when I called the iPad “an oversized cellphone that doesn’t allow calling and generally an ugly puppy.”

I also wrote scathingly several years back about a company arrogant enough to call its product support staff “geniuses” and a company so foolish as to rent expensive retail space and leave the square footage so dramatically sparse.

Since then, I have spent my share of time leaning over the Genius Bars of several Apple stores. I have found the quality of staff to be consistently excellent. I have never walked away without my problem being solved. In fact, it is probably the best retail support I have ever experienced.  Likewise, I have learned what Apple planned to do with all the “Zenly” open floor space–they have filled it with customers–almost all of them happy.

So how do I reconcile my argument that all businesses need to join the conversation, while simultaneously being an Apple products and support zealot.

Well, let me take a step back. Since 2005, I’ve consulted about 100 companies on some aspect of social media strategy. I’ve also written about another 300-400 companies. I’ve covered all sizes and many categories of companies and I am convinced that online conversation is becoming a universal, valuable and mandatory way of doing business and providing support solutions. It is essential for recruiting the best and brightest of people, particularly of  newest generation to enter the workplace. Social media allows companies to bring new and improved products to market faster, at lower cost and with reduced marketing expenses.

So why does Apple Computer get away with ignoring it?

Well, one of the few common threads in these hundreds of companies I’ve talked with is that each had a problem, an turned to social media as a solution or at least part of it. Apple did not. Apple has been under the thumb of one of the most brilliant command and control people of industrial history.

The brilliant part is a key. He seems to have known what we customers wanted before we did. There are few industrialists who have had this talent. One was Henry Ford. Ford, supported Adolph Hitler for many years, published America’s leading anti-semitic newspaper, hired professional thugs to bash the heads of strikers, had far more contemptuous traits than did Steve Jobs.

Yet he created the automotive industry as we know it. For better or worse, his own mind created the first mass-produced automobile for everyday people and thus changed the world. He too, did not listen to customers, abused employees and kept his cards so close to his vest that they might have been tattoos. He is famously quoted as saying that customers can have any color car they choose “so long as it is black.”

What happened next is often overlooked. A startup that would eventually be called General Motors [GM]  started producing cars in multiple colors–even two-tones. Henry Ford lived far longer than did Steve Jobs. He lived to see the decline and fall of his political views and the decline from pre-eminence of his car company.

Steve Jobs did not. He left a legacy of great products and services that will be remembered for a very long time. But sooner or later–as happens to all leaders–Apple will stumble. And when it does, it will not be in position to join the online conversation and it’s failure to be a social company will be a factor in it’s downfall–or so it seems to me.

As far as social media, Apple Computer and the choices I make. My loyalty doesn’t stay with any company. It stays with users. I will favor the company that offers the best product and the best service–until it is replaced by a new company doing a better job. My next car is likely to be a Ford, because I like their new products and and am convinced that the people who run the company today do not adhere to the founding Ford’s political views. My next computer is likely to be an Apple product–unless of course another company comes up with something better.

[Dell SM Listening Command Center. Dell File Photo]

I just read a New York Times item announcing that the Public Relations Society of America [PRSA] is launching a campaign to redefine the term “public relations” to make it more current in the 21st century.

I pointed to the article on Twitter and immediately got new jokes about the “spinners spinning their spin.” I see the humor, but it makes me sad. PR has so many true values to a company. One way or another every organization practices PR and it shapes who they are and how they fare in the marketplace.

The definition has remained the same for centuries. “Public Relations” is a self-defining term. It is the relationship between organizations of any size and people who make a difference to them.”

This has not changed, it is also highly unlikely to change moving forward.

What has changed are the tools of communications and the venues. The tools are now social and the venue is increasingly online. These two facts have upended virtually every profession and institution. They have forced the enterprise and corner store, governments and those who wish to overthrow them. It has changed advertising, news, religions, white-collar crime and just about all things–including public relations.

I can tell you the essential difference for the PR industry. People can now talk back at you and about you. They can do it with great speed and what they say can spread like wildfire faster than you can call a conference room meeting t discuss messaging or damage control.

I commend PRSA for understanding that something is broken. But I think they are trying to fix the wrong thing.

PR, for the past 60 years, has focused on broadcasting. They send messages out. When one approach doesn’t work, they try a new way to send the same messages in different forms. When talking doesn’t work, they shout.

In fact, what PRSA needs to teach its members is that they must learn to listen. They can now talk with customers, prospects, investors, potential employees and bring back the wisdom of vital crowds to organizational decision makers.

This is not touchy-feely thinking. This is serious business strategy. Dell Computer spent many millions of dollars to build a listening center. A staff listen to what is said about the company online every day. They monitor about 150,000 comments a week.

This listening engine fixes product flaws faster and less expensively than was previously possible. It turns ranting customers into ravers. It reduces time to market for new products and vastly lessens the burdens of customer support.

At Ford Motors, Scott Monty, the company’s top social media officer answers directly to the CEO. Ford has no desire to appear cool. But it understands that social media is where you spot problems and trends first and how you get the word out fastest.

If you don’t think these two cases are connected to public relations, then I just don’t know what to tell you.

My advice to public relations practitioners is that we live in a new, still-forming Conversational Age. It has replaced the Age of Broadcast. You need to join the conversation. It is where your customers are going and it is also where you should really shine.

After all, professional PR people are outstanding communicators, right?

PRSA is right that something is broken. The PR industry sees itself as being in he image business, yet they collectively have a truly awful image.

When I started speaking about social media in 2005, I used to joke that someday, conferences discussing social media will be about as relevant and well-attended as conferences on the business uses of the Fax machine.

I’m wondering if that day has come.

About a month ago I attended TC Disrupt, one of the biggest startup conferences and one dedicated to spotlighting companies that are likely to change the way we live and work. I noticed two terms that were never mentioned:

Web 2.0. Lots of us did not like the term to begin with, but it was needed to show the move from static sites into a new conversational web. Most of the world’s leading software developers have shifted their focus in this direction. We have entered a period where mobile apps are the focal point of innovation. It is no longer Web 2. It is just the web.

Social Media.I did not hear this term used once during the entire Disrupt conference. Yet every company presenting or exhibiting used social media as a vital component to their new companies. Some uses were unique and unprecedented. But social media has evolved as an obvious part of any app, certainly any mobile app.

Of course, I live in the San Francisco Bay area. I am exposed to early adopters wherever I turn. I have a focus on what’s new and what gets changed. Including social media has become obvious. What this enables has become far more relevant to the conversation.

However, this is Silicon Valley myopia. If you throw a rock into a large lake, where the rock plunks into the water is Silicon Valley. The ripples that roll out concentrically from that center are the rest of the world.

Much of the world is still struggling with social media issues, with how to shift from broadcast to conversational online engagement with customers, partners, investors and so on. This is certainly true in the parts of the world where everyday business has nothing to do with online conversations.

So social media is certainly not dead. Then neither is the fax machine. Both are essential to modern businesses, and in both cases the novelty has worn off. So has the disruption.

Social media has disrupted a great deal of everything in the last ten years. I call that the Decade of Disruption. Social media is now an essential ingredient to every modern marketplace. We have entered a new Age of Conversation. I think it will be around for a very long time.

But as for disruption and what’s new in the minds of the bright, irreverent, urgent culture that is Silicon Valley, I would turn attention to mobile apps and that is where I would look if I were a conference producer.

In the next few weeks I’ll be talking to a group of Spanish entrepreneurs in San Francisco at a StepOne event and then  participating in Nasscom, India’s largest startup conference.

In both cases, I’ve been asked to speak about how to make a great business presentation. The irony is that these two deals were cut just as Steve Jobs died. Jobs, without question was the best presenter the tech industry has produced to date.

He dressed in a uniform that was decidedly different from others. Thirty years of presentations followed a certain cadence and format, yet almost each of them was memorable, powerful and exciting.

Jobs was one of a kind and not one of you can emulate him. Jobs was one of a kind and the best parts of who he was came out in how he presented.

So my first advice to anyone planning a business presentation is to look, not at Jobs, but at yourself. What are your best presentation qualities? Are you funny? Eloquent? Creative? Whatever qualities you have, you should capture and exploit the way Jobs did.

There are certain tips that I think fit for most presenters. And that is what I will focus on advising these two roomfuls of entrepreneurs. This is a work-in-progress, so please tell me what I might add or remove:

1. Rehearse like crazy. Malcolm Gladwell noted that what most of the world’s most successful people–artists and entrepreneurs share in common is that they rehearse like crazy. If you didn’t have time to rehearse, then you are not ready to present. If you did not prepare the audience will see it. Your lack of readiness will reflect on their perceptions of your product and company.

2. Your product is your star. Almost every tech startup by definition is about a new and hopefully disruptive startup. Introduce your product as early into the presentation that you can. Build everything else: position, opportunity, model, team around product.

3. Simple is best.  Use the fewest, clearest and least ambiguous language you can use. Say as little as you can while still covering all key points. Do not show how hard it was to make. Show how easy it is to use.

In ”Good to Great” by Jim Collins, he tells the 1987 story of Jerry  Kaplan who pitched his idea for Go Corp, the first pen input device. The VCs “Good to Great” by Jim Collins expected to see a prototype, or at least a PowerPoint slide of the photo along with artist renderings. Instead, Kaplan took a notebook portfolio he was holding tossed it into the air and watch as it landed with a loud clap in the middle of the conference table.

“This is my model for the future of personal computing,” he told the stunned investors. It was a move that Jobs would have admired.

He got the money.

The drama was great, but more important he demonstrated in a way so simple and clear, that no one could miss that a wireless mobile small computer was the right direction. It turned out he was right. It just took longer than he figured.

4. Be very aware of who your audience is and what they want from you. Investors wants to hear about how you’ll make them rich. Journalists want a great story. Potential employees want a good home in a friendly neighborhood. Structure what you say for them and not for you.

5. Leave drilling to miners and dentists. The objective of a good presentation is to start a conversation, not end it. Keep your presentation at a high level, customizing it for what your audience wants. Let the details come in questions after you have completed your monolog and get into dialogue. Let your listeners do the drilling on the topics they choose.

5. Cut the crap. In “Naked Conversations,” my book with Robert Scoble, we coined the word “Corpspeak,” referring to the adjective-packed hubris put out by a great many marketing and PR teams. We have all become jaundiced to inflated claims  and overstated claims can cause you lasting damage. Credibility is like virginity: once you lose it, it is extremely difficult to get back.

6. Show your team, culture & spirit. Many VCs tell me that they invest in team more than technology. Team does not mean an impressive list of resumes. It means people who work together, play together and help each other win. You show team by style. It is almost impossible to capture in a PowerPoint. But your apparel–and the words you use–reveal your culture. The components I look for when interviewing or consulting a start up includes:

• Optimism. In the US, I’ve read that 90% of all startups fail. I like to see a team that really believes they will succeed where everyone else has failed
• Urgency. All startups have to deal with constraints. Yet, with limited time and money they need to beat competitors to the market and prevail. I just don’t trust entrepreneurs who do not somehow reveal a sense of urgency.
• Attitude. I can’t tell you just what the right attitude is. But I’m pretty sure I know it when I see it.

7. Paint both a grand picture and a detailed miniature.  When I still had my PR agency, I represented Homestead Technologies. It’s founder/CEO Justin Kitsch started his presentations with: “We are building a company to last 100 years. Now let me tell you what we are doing this quarter.” Brilliant move.

8. Disrupt something. If you are a startup, you need to wedge your way onto a crowded playing field. Your presentation should make it clear how you are going to change the world and why won’t the incumbent can’t stop you.

9. Tell a story. People have told stories in just five minutes that have endured 5,000 years. By contrast, I have seen entrepreneurs spend five minutes on a PowerPoint slide and it felt like 5,000 years. We humans are addicted to story telling and good ones, that illustrate your points, are far more memorable and enduring than all the analytics, metrics, charts and graphs you can jam into a presentation.

10. Personalize. The best presentation story-telling almost always personal. When Robert Carr introduced Framework, an integrated software package of the 1980s, he began with, “I developed Framework so that I could work on a computer they way I work in real life.” The line is much imitated over the years. In fact, variations of it have well outlasted the product.

I consulted Munjal Shah in 2006, when he founded a company called Riya, a photo recognition company, sold eventually to Google. He launched it by describing his difficulty of finding his baby’s photo among thousands in his digital collection. Into his formal launch presentation, he posted the baby picture and stated: “There’s my baby! Isn’t she a cutie?”

For the remainder of the conference people talked about Riya and how you can find photos of people you love. The technology breakthroughs were faded to background, which immensely helped the product.

11. Lighten up. Even seasoned serial entrepreneurs get jittery and intense in planning a presentation. That’s fine, but never let your audience see you sweat. Actors, I imagine, are nervous  before a play opens. But when you start, lighten up. Almost no audience is out to get you. They want to see-and-hear something useful and interesting to them. They didn’t pay the admission price to see you suck. Have fun when you present. It seems to me that in business, fun is vastly underrated for it’s value.

12. Finish early. I have rehearsed a great many companies before they presented to investors, the press and at conferences. I absolutely insist that they finish well short of the allotted time. When you present it will invariably take longer than when you rehearse. You want to talk at an easy, comfortable pace. Rushing will ruin it.

I am only speaking for a short while at both events and 12 points seem like the most I can get in while adhering to my own advice of finishing early. What am I leaving out? What should I add in? Got a case study for me to illustrate any of these points?

To me, the Grand Canyon of Social Media is the ability to be social in private.

I want to be able to talk to my fellow Red Sox Fans without a Yankee booster jumping in and without a spammer telling me where I can buy a sports tee-shirt online. I want to learn from friends who know more about China, India, Israel or South Africa than I do, and I don’t want intruders hijacking our conversations away from cultural and into political paths.

I can’t get this on Twitter or Facebook. I thought Google was taking me there but now almost a half year later, this has not happened. My Circle are not cozy nooks for me to chat with friends. Google is evolving into yet another place where broadcast seems more appealing than conversation and where privacy is really not assured.

I had thought that Google+ broke new ground, but all it seems to have done is make a neater path to get where you already get, crossing ground you’ve already traversed.

I didn’t make a conscious effort to  abandon Google+. I just found myself going there less and less. I waited to hear about what I was missing, but I never really heard much in that area. I found myself back at Twitter, using it just about the same way I’ve been using it for years. If there were any lasting change, it was over at Facebook, where I find myself liking the changes that they have made… at least for now.

But yesterday, when news reports asserted that 60% of Google+ users had abandoned the platform, I was surprised, but not shocked. But then, Computerworld’s Mike Elgan, a journalist I greatly respect, showed why that number was probably greatly inflated.

But, for me, social network is not really about massive trends and big numbers. I want to hang out where my friends hang out. I want to have interesting and useful conversations. I want to give when I can and I appreciate that I meet people who do the same for me.

I asked the folks who follow me on Twitter about Google+ and ket a tally. The count is continuing, but the trend is clear. Some 34 people told me they have abandoned or greatly reduced their use of Google+. Only two–both early adopters, are still using and loving it.

Mike Elgan’s math may be right, but I’m pretty sure that my friends and colleagues are trending sharply away from Google+

And they are doing it for the same reasons:

• Not enough new-and-different for them to switch established habits
• Their friends and colleagues are not hanging out there
• The only dominating conversation is about Google+ itself.

If size matter, then TechCrunch Disrupt [TC Disrupt] wins the prize. With 2600 attendees, it is arguably the largest US-based tech industry conference. With 200 companies exhibiting–often for  just one of three days–it often took on the characteristics of a trade show.

I just love the promise and excitement in young start-ups exploding with grand visions. While many of these visions will turn out to have been hallucinations, but others will be real and will disrupt something large and institutional who will disdain them until it is too late.

For companies showing the ability to disrupt this was just about the best show I’ve attended in more than 25 years in the tech industry.

That should be what this column is about, and it part it is. But the the conversation going in and coming out of this event was more directed at the drama and trauma that is Michael Arrington and his hand-picked TechCrunch team.

If you like controversy, well this one was juicier than crushed peaches in your pocket.

At the very core of it, of course, was Michael Arrington, the charismatic, controversial former lawyer, turned startup founder, turned  TechCrunch founder turned angel investor. The fact that these serial entrepreneurial endeavors have overlapped are at the root of all this controversy.

TechCrunch covers startups. Arrington has long invested in them in the earliest phases and TechCrunch writes about them. While there have been some utterances of there being no conflict, no one seems to be able to recall an incident where an Arrington company has not been favorably covered in the TechCrunch newsletter that enjoys two million unique visits each month.

I have previously described Arrington  as the Rupert Murdoch of our industry. Both have incredible power and influence over publications that reach mass audiences all over the world. Both influence investors and other media. Both have been called bullies, and in my view, for good reason. And most recently both have been called to rask for questionable ethical practices particularly the venerable New York Times.

For all these reasons,  Arrington, like Murdoch, seems to make enemies by the truckload.

Arrington’s controversies reached something of a crescendo the week before TC Disrupt opening Sept. 12.

The week prior, usually is filled with editorial speculations on what new media and web-based apps and trends would be unveiled. Instead it was filled with fast-breaking news of Arrington’s abrupt and dramatic termination from AOL who had bought TechCrunch for $30 million last year, a deal that disrupted a prior Disrupt event.

Each of these incidents seem to me to be a distraction. Journalists are taught in 101 courses never to get in the way of your story. Yet Arrington seems to be a persistant roadblock of his own production, this time featuring 200 very promising companies exhibiting and 30 presenting on the stage;  2600 people gathered in the vast, dark San Francisco Design Center and tens of thousands more watching the livestream worldwide.

TechCrunch was born in controversy. Arrington and erstwhile founding

partner Jason Calacanis, had attended a DEMO conference. DEMO has been around for 21 years and was a consistent success, until Arrington and Calacanis–sitting at a bar at the DEMO conference–announced they would start Disrupt to directly compete with the well-established IDG production.  By no coincidence, would be held on the same dates as a future DEMO.

Calacanis had previously started two tech news organizations. He sold Silicon Alley Reporter to Murdoch’s Dow Jones Company , which promptly bungled it to death. Then Calacanis sold founded the controversy-loving Engadget, which he sold to AOL who has done rather well with it.

At last year’s San Francisco Disrupt event, Calacanis suddenly disappeared. Arrington went on the dais to announce the couple had gotten a surprise divorce. A court will decide the terms of desolution in a saga that may take a few years and mud wrestling matches to resolve.

Calacanis has since started his own product-intro conference, Launch, which has a similar format and was held in March in the same SF Design Center. Calacanis has announced plans to start a newsletter of its own and few doubt it will compete against TechCrunch.

So, it seemed to me that TechCrunch’s brief history had already become steeped in controversy going into this fall edition. For the 200 companies who hope to build awareness and win customers by strutting their stuff on the stage or in the exhibition hallways, there was some hope that this yer, unlike previous years, there might be some hope that the spotlight would remain on them, without the eruption of a sideshow that would diminish  and divert focus.

But then it hit the fan.

This year’s trauma eclipsed all the traumas that have come before it.  A while back, Arrington announced he was starting an early phase investment fund, calling it CrunchFund. This would mean that CrunchFund could invest in startups that TechCrunch would write about and who could also be stars in TechCrunch events such as Disrupt.

It wasn’t really anything all that new. Arrington has been investing in companies for years. Many have fared well at TechCrunch events–as have other companies in which he did not invest.

I was an early critic of this practice. Other newsletter impresarios of earlier years had gone into investing and immediately divested themselves of any editorial interests to avoid conflict or even the appearance of it. But back then I was hollering in a hurricane. Some people grumbled privately, but no one wanted to take on Arrington whose TechCrunch has proven to be a powerful bully pulpit a great many times.

And for the sake of my own transparency: Michael Arrington and I were once friends. We no longer are. We do not wish each other well. For precisely these reasons, I rarely cover his activities, and when I do, I try to give a balanced view, but advise you to keep in mind my personal perspective.

What had changed for Arrington was that he was no longer a private investor running a privately held company. He was employed by AOL, a publicly held and closely watched company struggling to make a comeback on ground it had previously lost. AOL, it was disclosed, was a major investor in the new CrunchFund.

On Sept. 1, 11 days before Disrupt, Arrington & AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. “TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards… we have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch.”

There are many ways that TechCrunch could have been positioned at that point. It seems to me that Armstrong picked about the lamest approach. Other possible positioning was discussed by TechCrunch’s Paul Carr, who played much of the host role at this year’s conference and is clearly loyal to Arrington.

The response was instant and mostly negative. The lofty, New York Times, which in itself competes with AOL and TechCrunch in the media business hit hard to the negative side challenging the ethics of both Arrington and AOL.

Traveling through Brazil at the time, Arrington’s boss Ariana Huffington, no stranger to controversy herself,decided she couldn’t stand the heat so she threw Arrington out of the kitchen. She unceremoniously sacked Arrington.

And the saga of drama continued into the days immediately preceding the conference, there were all sorts of speculations: the TechCrunch team would resign en mass. Arrington would assemble them to start a new online media organization; Arrington would buy TechCrunch back from AOL; the whole thing was just a stunt to fan fires and grab attention.

Then came the conference. All seats were filled for many reasons. The opening remarks often set the tone for an entire conference. Their was mystery and speculation on who would deliver them and how the issue of Arrington would be folded into it.

Then, none other than Michael  Arrington strode onto the dais.There were murmurs of surprise. He waited until the room became entirely still and then spoke for less than five minutes.

His tone was calm and his style was gracious. He explained that he was an AOL employee for four more days and he was on stage in that light. He talked of his life being filled with personal drama, and urged attendees to focus more on the 30 presenting companies as well as the other startups exhibiting in the StartUp Alley exhibition area.

In my view, it was one of his finest moments.

And for the most part, attendees abided by Arrington’s recommendation. While there was much talk on the controversy, most of the people I talked with were talking about the startups they represented or the ones they enjoyed.

The TechCrunch teams gets to see most industry companies in their earliest phases. They have a good eye for quality, for tech trends and yes companies with the potential of disrupting the status quo where disruption is much needed.

This year showed a couple of companies who promise to make healthcare issues easier for people. One of the Cake Health was a finalist. Another couple were making it easier for people to get organic food from local sources. One of them Farmigo, was a finalist and I’ll be writing about both of them in the future.

My personal favorite was a mobile app from Vocre of San Jose that lets you instantly translate via a mobile app in 13 languages. It won the people’s choice award and is available in beta for iPhone users.

There were at least 15 companies who were focused on small business. This was a pleasant surprise. I’ve long been a champion of social products for small business and this conference showed me that there’s a fast-forming trend to help small business with programs that are more sophisticated and useful than Facebook fan pages.

Also I was at the conference representing American Express Open Forum, and I found a wealth of material there for my columns in the form of some exceptionally fine companies.

Everyone–yes everyone–I spoke with said they were happy they attended and were getting as much or more than they had expected from the conference which filled the large and unfortunately dark San Francisco Design Center to it’s walls.

But elements of controversy seemed to pervade far too much:

• The actual start ups presentations–the real stars of the show did not get to present until the closing hours of each day. Most of the primetime morning stage events were interviews with prominent VCs, many of them are apparently doing business with Arrington.  The quality of these conversations and interviews was not bad–although the questions were often disappointingly softball.
• The winner of TC Disrupt, which receives a $50,000 cash award, and the first runner up were both companies Arrington had invested in–it was disclosed.
• Pressly, a presenting company with visually beautiful graphics for reading media content on a  mobile device did a great presentation then got hammered by two judges who just happened, it turned out, to have investments in Flipbook an obvious competitor of Pressly.
• Robert Scoble was banned from attending. Arrington had told him his crime was that he had favorably covered Calacanis Launch conference earlier in the year. Scoble held court in a small bar across the where many presenting companies went to be video interviewed by him. To bar presenting companies access to Scoble, one of the most influential voices on new technologies seemed to me to be particularly petty and unfair to entrepreneurs.
• The Techcrunch team is clearly pissed that their leader has been taken out of the game. Little shots from the dais were fired at varying intervals for the three days. Arrington, was less gracious then earlier when he pointed out that Om Malik heads a newsletter, yet is part of an investment fund. In my view the comment did not help Arrington, but probably hurt Malik.

Some day, I believe, people’s online civil rights will be protected by laws, just like the they are in the real world. But that day will not come soon, not in these short-sighted and polarized times.

So until then I propose this Online User’s Manifesto.

A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature and sometimes religious. Two manifestos have so far been published related to online issues.

In 1999, four diverse and passionate authors published The Cluetrain Manifesto. Addressed to “The People of Earth,” it declared that markets are conversations and that we should not think of the internet as places where trains whiz by delivering gadgets and gizmos to markets. Instead we should envision the internet as a table for two, where honest, personal conversations can be conducted.

Cluetrain, was a lightening rod for a lot of thinking that drove the early phases of social media.

In 2005, Robert Scoble, then Microsoft’s best-known social media personality, set the standard for enterprise social behavior in his Corporate Weblog Manifesto, which told people to tell the truth and speak in a human voice.

The Corporate Manifesto became the framework for how the enterprise could credibly use social media to engage with relevant audiences.

So, manifestos have made a difference in online conversations. I hope this one does as well.

I hope that my User Manifesto serves as a small step for our online rights. It is self-evident that we users are having our rights abused and we have some distance to travel to right the wrongs being done. Help me build upon this first step. Add other elements to the manifesto. Dispute my argument or otherwise further the conversation I’m trying to start.

This is not my Manifesto. It is ours.

The Online User Manifesto

1. We the people of the internet have certain inalienable rights, which you the online site provider cannot remove or diminish. We were born with these rights and do not relinquish them when we go online.  When we visit your site, we continue to have these rights and you will respect those right.

2. You have presumed the right to gather data on each of us. You collect it, resell it and decide what we will see based on it. You call this “personalization.”

We recognize that it would be easier to stem the ocean’s tide than to stop these practices. But you must stop doing this in secret. You assume a privacy related to our personal data by taking our own privacy away from us and this must stop.

We have the right what you say and sell related to ourselves and this you cannot keep from us.

We, the users, have the right to review the personal data you collect on us. We have the right to challenge it and even add our own comments. If you make assumptions, based on this data, you must ask us before presuming to filter and shape the results you give us users in the name of “better user experience.”

3. In the same name of personalization you determine what we see when we search. You determine who we friend, follow and what we read. You have, without our permission, become our filters and censors.

You do this autonomously, and that determines not only what each of us gets to see and know, but also what other people get to see and know about us.

This is just not right. We demand the right to Opt In before you manipulate the content we see.

4. Legally, you are adept at covering your buttocks with small type and legalese that most of us do not read and cannot understand. If you are required to use such language, then you will develop executive summaries, which state in clear and simple terms, what is being said.

5. You select content for us you think we will like. The advantage to you, you believe is that we will stay longer, be exposed to more ads and enjoy the people we encounter.

This may or may not be true. We, the users, have the right to see content and viewpoints that are different from our own. Liberals can opt to see content from conservatives and the reverse. Atheists and agnostics can have easy access to people espousing religious agendas.

We have the right not to become a polarized society for the decisions you make about us without our knowledge or consent.

6. We have the right to own our words, images and thoughts. To take ownership of our words with or without permission is plagiarism. To reuse any intellectual property without attribution is theft. To ignore these facts is to ignore laws as they stand in most countries of the world.