Has the Michael Arrington meteor reached its zenith? It's a question you gotta ask after the Wall St. Journal did a fairly extensive profile on the "Newest Silicon Valley Power Broker". The story provides some good details about Arrington's personal history, including a stint working for Ottawa-based Pool.com Inc., which resells domain names. What I find fascinating about Arrington's influence and stature is how it all came together for him. Clearly, he has tremendous energy and entrepreneurial drive but why was he able to grab the power broker title rather than a Tim O'Reilly , for example, or a high-profile VC? (Just out of curiosity, was there a "Michael Arrington" during Web 1.0?)

In terms of TechCrunch, Arrington said it makes $120,000 a month in revenue from ads, sponsorships and a job-posting service. He addresses criticism about his conflicts of interest given he has his hands in so many different pies.

"Mr. Arrington acknowledges that he faces conflicts of interest. Companies that paid thousands of dollars to sponsor his 750-person party at August Capital, held two months ago, for example, were promised write-ups on TechCrunch, though the blurbs were marked as "sponsored text." Some Web companies have called TechCrunch to place ads, "and then they'll ask, 'When are you going to write about us?' " he says.

"Mr. Arrington adds that he strives to keep his editorial content separate from the blog's advertising and recently hired a dedicated ad saleswoman to try to eliminate potential conflicts. Earlier this year, he also started posting more detailed disclosures about his financial ties to TechCrunch companies on the blog. Such ties aren't uncommon in the freewheeling world of blogs, where writers generally don't adhere to traditional journalistic standards."

Deep Jive Interests makes an excellent point about the absence of TechCrunch competition (I guess he doesn't count Maple Leaf 2.0 as competition....:)

Just like the VCs adored e-commerce start-ups during the dot-com boom, they've got a big, bad thing for mobile start-ups these days. Case in point is MobiTV, which just raised another $30-million from a group of investors that includes Hearst Corp. and Adobe Systems. So far, MobiTV has raised $125-million, and it's far from a slam dunk whether there's a huge demand among mobile device users to watch video on little screens. That said, the VCs seems to more than happy to finance mobile services and technology. It will be interesting to see how well Toronto-based Ambient Vector does in its pursuit of private equity. If anything, the company seems to be in the right place at the right time.

While the Net Neutrality has raged in the U.S., it's been quiet in Canada....until now. Yesterday, Videotron CEO Robert Depatie said the federal government should levy a "transmission tariff" on content providers so they can support the cost of building and maintaining networks. "If the movie studio were to mail a DVD . . . they would expect to pay postage or courier fees,” he told Canadian Press. "Why should they not expect a transmission tariff?". Depatie said he also concerned "Canada lags behind in pricing competitives and technology because the regulatory regime discriminates against new providers like Videotron". If there was ever a public shot across the bow of the federal government and telecom regulator, Depatie just delivered a one-two punch. In a sense, his move is a positive because it could compel the CRTC (Canada's telecom and media regulator) to finally get involved in the Net Neutrality issue/controversy. So far, the CRTC's standard response to inquiries about Net Neutrality is it won't act until it receives a complaint, which is hardly pro-active or forward-thinking. It is somewhat interesting to see a cableco push forward the Net Neutrality issue given it's the carriers who are losing customers and revenue as cablecos get deeper in the local telephone business. Then again, the cablecos are being forced to make large investments in their networks to stay competitive with increasingly-desperate carriers so the interest in external "help" is hardly a surprise. As for Depatie's contention the CRTC discrimminates against providers such as Videotron, that's just off-base given Canadian cablecos are barely regulated while carriers are still in regulatory shackles. I wonder my what my friend, Mark Goldberg, thinks about Depatie's comments.For more, check out Rob Hyndman, who describes some of Depatie's statements as "bizarre", and Michael Geist, who runs with the Net Neutrality theme.