High Protein Menu

I woke up this morning and a young friend of mine sent me a quick IM - 'heard of the techcrunch fiasco?' I have certainly heard of TechCrunch and read it occasionally, and recalled that they had redesigned recently, but hell - what a joke the comments section of CrunchNotes, Mike Arrington's blog has become.

It seems that the 'fiasco' was due to him posting a quick mockup another designer sent to him which improved slightly on the original redesign. No big deal, right? Well, maybe in the real world - but the 'blogosphere' can make a mountain out of ANYTHING, and indeed they did.

30 comments later and poor old Mike is forced to try and justify something that really doesn't need justifying. Sure, he could have used a little more tact in his original post -- specifically, the line 'There is a lot here that I intend to steal.' struck me as a little left of centre (considering how antsy designers can get), but really, what is the problem here?

Upon further inspection, it seems that the drama got even more "intense" as Rachel resigned from her position of designer at TechCrunch. Good move, right? Perhaps, if Mike didn't learn about this from a track-back. Nice one.

Are people really so starved for entertainment that something like this warrants such a huge and largely unjustified response? I've read through probably 100 comments on three separate blog posts now, and the amount of sheer stupidity in many of them is really dumbfounding.

Try to put things into perspective people, and Mike, if you're reading this and still need another designer - drop me a line... sheesh.