★ “Q&A with MG Siegler: From blogger to VC”

CNN Fortune:

I’m happy for MG on his transition from Blogger to VC. It’s a huge step and one that we all could see coming. Aside from the TechCrunch mess of this summer, I always saw MG one day taking a Gruber approach and, the more I followed his Tumblr, the more easy it was to see him one day being a lone ranger, taking Parislemon full time and making that his job and filling up his time with speaking gigs, some consulting and analyzing our industry. It’s nice that he’s ending up somewhere already populated with friends that he has worked with and trusts. This quote is something I’d like to review briefly:

I’ve gotten very good at filtering. At TechCrunch, we would see hundreds of pitches a day — we could not do them all. We had to choose the best. Everyone has their own ways of doing that, but generally I would use my network to both vouch for certain entrepreneurs or just see what startups my friends were talking about.

In terms of what I may have to “relearn”, I guess I’d say the difference between a “hot” company and a “good” company. That is to say, the difference between a company that will make for a good story, versus one that will make for a good business. I’m not too worried about that distinction, but it is something I’ve thought about.

This may be the one thing about blogging in general that bothers me. Journalists are guilty of this as well because even Walt Mossberg was friends with Steve Jobs. I’m a fan of MG’s writing but, the fine line that we all have is that friendships do influence what we say. I’ve been keeping a running count of the amount of times Marco Arment, Shawn Blanc and John Gruber link to each other or link to blogs that use the ad service The Deck. There’s an argument that bloggers who use The Deck for ads are high quality blogs with a similar demographic but there’s also an argument that bloggers who use The Deck link to other blogs using the same ad host because there’s some unspoken agreement. What a claim! I’m not saying it’s true but it’s something I notice a lot.

Back to MG, I know he has integrity and I know what he writes has been criticized mostly by anonymous haters but he also knows a lot of people in tech and often has a friend at a company he writes about and that leads to undisclosed things but really why disclose if a friend works somewhere? Why disclose that you are friends with the CTO of Pandora, post photos at his wedding and then rave about their new redesign on TechCrunch? You don’t have to disclose that but maybe he should. I’m not an ethics enforcer when it comes to disclosure but I think using your network to vouch for certain entrepreneurs is difficult because a large network means you find out about new companies but, when it’s your friends who are starting those companies, you may need to disclose that.

This post from Arrington becomes more real every year.