Well here I am joining a Techmeme scrum ;-) The big news today is that Michael Arrington announced a CEO for Techcrunch - Heather Harde, who is currently the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media. This really does prove that blogs can be big business - it's a heck of an achievement head-hunting a senior executive from Rupert Murdoch's Internet arm (and the owners of MySpace)! It's also good news for other tech blogs - like Read/WriteWeb, Gigaom, VentureBeat, and indeed any new professional blog - as it validates that blogs can be successful media ventures, given the right focus and a lot of hard work.

It also made me think back about the days when Techcrunch started. Its first post was June 11 2005 and the topic was Technorati - ironically in that post Mike mentioned the Technorati 100, which he wistfully noted "is the definitive list of popular bloggers on the web." Little did he know that 21 months later he would be number 3 on that list. Indeed little did I know that I would be number 41!

Techcrunch logo circa June 2005

I actually contacted Mike and Keith Teare (a shareholder in Techcrunch and Mike's business partner) in that very first week of Techcrunch's publication. Ivan Pope had pointed out to me a new blog called Techcrunch and so, a few days after their first post, I emailed Keith to find out more. He cc'ed Mike and from there I discovered that both were fans of Read/WriteWeb. Indeed Mike told me he had "been using it for leads on Techcrunch" :-) Of course this was back in June 2005 and we all know what happened next: Techcrunch was the first to focus exclusively on web 2.0 startup reviews and as a result it became the main resource for the dot com II boom, which came to be known as Web 2.0. Read/WriteWeb has also done well out of the boom, but my niche turned out to be not quite as mass appealing as Mike's ;-)