Submit nominations for your favorite startups, apps, cloud services and more in the 20 categories now through December 6. (Do that here!), and don’t forget to buy your tickets now. Nominations close at 11:59pm PT on December 6, 2012. We’ll announce the finalists on January 3, 2013, and open up the final round of voting then. (You’ll find all the rules here.)

Mark it on your calendars:
Thursday, January 31, 2013
7:30pm – 11:30pm
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco

This year’s categories (and last year’s winners):
Best Technology Achievement (2011: Siri)
Best Collaborative Consumption Service (New for 2012)
Best E-Commerce Application (New for 2012)
Best Mobile Application (2011: Evernote)
Fastest Rising Startup (New for 2012)
Best Content Discovery Application (New for 2012)
Best Design (2011: Path 2.0)
Best Bootstrapped Startup (2011: Imgur)
Sexiest Enterprise Startup (New for 2012)
Best International Startup (2011: Peixe Urbano)
Best Education Startup (New for 2012)
Best Hardware Startup (New for 2012)
Best Time Sink (2011: Words With Friends)
Biggest Social Impact (2011: Twitter)
Angel of the Year (2011: Reid Hoffman)
VC of the Year (2011: Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz)
Founder of the Year (2011: Jack Dorsey)
CEO of the Year (2011: Jeff Weiner)
Best New Startup of 2012 (2011: Pinterest)
Best Overall Startup of 2012 (2011: Dropbox)

Check out additional coverage from our partners: Techcrunch and VentureBeat.

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

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Here are the latest figures from comScore:

The numbers raise the question of whether the TechCrunch train wreck should be a parable for other media companies.

For anyone who missed it, the site’s unravelling went something like this: AOL (NYSE: AOL) bought TechCrunch in the fall of 2010 and, in a fit of exuberance, the blog’s founder Michael Arrington described the deal as “a perfect fit” and said he would be around for a “very, very long time.”

A year later, Arrington was gone. His parting was triggered by a cat fight with another AOL media maven, Arianna Huffington, and was soon followed by a trickle of other high profile departures. The trickle became a flood this year, leaving TechCrunch gutted of nearly all its talent. Yesterday, yet another chief was out the door, as AOL announced that Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch’s editor, would be replaced by Eric Eldon.

On top of the declining traffic, an editor at popular aggregator Techmeme, which TechCrunch at one point dominated, noted yesterday that the tech blog is poised to lose its spot atop the “leader board.” (Update: The editor, Lidija Davis, and Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza objected to my earlier phrasing that TechCrunch is “sliding down” the board; I concede the point).

The site’s collapse has been spectacular but was not, apparently, foretold from the beginning. According to Jonathan Dube, who was SVP and General Manager of AOL News & Information at the time, the AOL-TechCrunch went smoothly for the first six months. Dube says that fusing a start-up and a large company is always difficult but not impossible. “Integration can work. I think it depends on the cultures of the companies and the personalities involved.”

In this case, the personalities involved meshed about as well as Raiders and 49er fans.

But, despite the ugliness of the marriage, it doesn’t necessarily mean AOL shouldn’t have tried in the first place. Keep in mind that TechCrunch’s $25 million price tag amounted to a cheap investment for a major media company seeking to acquire a gloss of tech cachet. The purchase doesn’t appear to have had any significant effect on AOL’s bottom line. While AOL doesn’t break out TechCrunch in its financial reporting – and didn’t speak about the tech blog in its last earnings call–AOL’s share price has been flying high. Meanwhile, AOL recently reported ongoing traffic growth at the Huffington Post Group (which it bought for 10 times the price of TechCrunch) and annual company-wide revenues of $2.2 billion for 2011.

Update: In his own take on TechCrunch’s woes, Michael Arrington this morning reported that traffic has declined 50 percent since his departure.

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Sarah Lacy, an author and veteran journalist (most recently with TechCrunch) is launching PandoDaily, a daily technology news blog focused on startups and the startup ecosystem. The name for the site comes from a colony of trees in Utah called, Pando Trees. Though spread across 43 hectares and weighing 6000 tons, the colony’s interconnected root system is the inspiration for this new site and Lacy is focusing on the startup ecosystem.

Lacy has roped in former colleagues – Michael Arrington, M.G. Seigler and Paul Carr for the new site as guest columnists. Farhad Manjoo, a columnist for Slate and Fast Company joins the group of writers who will write what Lacy calls “exclusives, edgy opinion posts, stellar product analysis, insightful people and culture stories and *real* breaking news.” She has also hired a couple of other bloggers for the new company and is in the process of hiring folks to help her with sales and organizing events.

The company is being funded by a $2.5 million investment from some of the most well known investors in Silicon Valley and some of the top seed funds. Investors in PandoDaily are – Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih (Zappos), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon (FounderCollective), Saul Klein (IndexVentures), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital) , Jeff Jordan (ex-CEO, Open Table) and Matt Cohler (ex-Facebook & Benchmark Capital) – who are all investing as individuals. The seed funds investing in the company include the CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

Lacy left TechCrunch and believed that selling it to AOL was a mistake. She says she doesn’t plan to sell this company and if she does, then she will have failed. In a blog post on her new site, she writes:

I’ve never been one of those people who just wanted to start a company for the sake of starting a company. I was more than happy to spend life writing about them. I’d thought about starting a blog in the past, but ultimately decided it would be more fun to work with Mike and Heather to make TechCrunch even bigger. We didn’t agree on everything, but I always felt TechCrunch got the important things right — things like giving a crazy founderthe benefit of the doubt that his plan might work and things like flatly calling out bad actors in the ecosystem.

So this fall, when AOL violated the promises not to meddle in TechCrunch’s affairs kicking off an exodus of talent and a subsequent decline of page views, I got a lot of very kind job offers. But I knew I had two real options: Stay and help put the pieces back together or and leave and start something that I could decide not to sell to AOL.

To do the former, I would have to get over everything that had happened. And I knew I couldn’t do that. And the idea of starting something new — starting with a clean sheet of paper, surrounded by great advisors and knowing with everything we’d learned at TechCrunch– was so intoxicating that in the end, that was the biggest reason I quit.

And while we might compete with PandoDaily for stories, as a fellow entrepreneur I am excited for Sarah. I am glad she made this move into entrepreneurship. I have watched  Sarah go from being a reporter for a local business newspaper in Santa Clara to a writer for Business Week and then an author of multiple books before ultimately finding her true voice at TechCrunch.

Good luck with the journey, Sarah!

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The Crunchies, now in its fifth year, highlights the most forward-thinking startups, innovative technologies and best VCs. This year, it will be held on January 31, 2012, in a new venue, Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

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The award ceremony and after-party will be held Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at a new venue — Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. We’ll have twice the capacity of previous shows. As usual, tickets will be released in batches, starting in early December.

Submit nominations for your favorite startups, apps, cloud services and more in the 20 categories now through December 13. (Read all the rules here.) Finalists will be announced in early January.

Image courtesy of TechCrunch.

Without going into all the plot points, that’s exactly what’s happening in this episode of As TechCrunch Turns. MG Siegler, one of the writers who went public with their threats and angst over Michael Arrington’s status, and an admitted star in the TC constellation, is leaving, sort of, to be a general partner in the $20 million CrunchFund.

Arrington’s CrunchFund raise, which included $10 million from TC owner AOL (NYSE: AOL) and $10 million from investors TC covers, set off the chain events that led to him leaving AOL and TC; public drama with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington; columnist Paul Carr quitting and getting an investment from Tony Hsieh for a Las Vegas startup; Arrington writing as an “unpaid” blogger (with that $20 million fund) at his new Uncrunched; and so on.

Turns out, according to TC’s Erick Schonfeld, Siegler has spent the last few months not only warding off other media outlets, but being wooed by VCs. The solution: Siegler (aka @parislemon) will work at TC for another month, then join Arrington as a VC and continue after that as an outside columnist:

The scope of what he will write about will be very narrow: Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). He won’t write about startups or venture capital. And just like he has always done, he will continue to follow our editorial standards, which require strict disclosures for any kind of conflict whatsoever-financial, business, or personal.

It’s part of a change that will bring more columnists to TechCrunch, according to Schonfeld. With the loss of Arrington (amplified by his new competition with TC), Carr and Siegler leaving and Sarah Lacey on maternity leave, it makes sense that he would want to add more strong voices. He also promises to add more full-time writers (I almost wrote “journalists” but maybe he used writers on purpose given the potential heavy meaning of the J word).

I can’t wait to see who gets the AOL beat.

Update: Siegler, who already has changed his Twitter bio to “partner at CrunchFund, columnist at TechCrunch, has his say on his personal blog.

Then there was the not-so-inside joke of being able to reach Arrington’s Uncrunched through an obscene url aimed directly at Huffington, functional last night but broken now.

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He’ll be at Disrupt as planned but he no longer has any financial interest, responsibility or say over the site and company he founded. He does leave with a lovely parting prize: AOL’s $10 million investment in his new $20 million VC fund. Will it still be called CrunchFund? That’s up to Arrington to say, I’m told.

In what seems like just the right move to reassure the TechCrunch staff (if they want to be) and outsiders, Erick Schonfeld has been promoted to editor. It’s possible a lot of the sturm und drang of the past week could have been avoided if that had been clear from the beginning.

In fact, most of what’s gone on the past week could have been avoided. Armstrong wanted Arrington so badly for AOL — as did Arianna Huffington when she came on as editor-in-chief in the Huffington Post acquisition — that they found a spot on the slippery slope where they all could live. That was the idea of Arrington as an individual investor, an angel picking his spots based on the startup with Armstrong and Huffington treating him as an exception.

As hard a sell as that was to some, Arrington as active fundraiser taking money from VCs TechCrunch covers turned a slippery slope into one covered in grease, particularly when it became known that at least some of the VCs saw the investment as a knowledge and possible deal conduit to TechCrunch. (If you think journalists are miffed, you should hear one of the investors I know talk a blue streak about the VCs who got involved.)

This has been posed by some as a great ethical debate or some kind of effort by mainstream journalists to point fingers at bloggers. It’s not a great debate. It’s as picayune as they come — and TechCrunch is as mainstream as it gets in many respects, despite the rebel-without-a-pause attitude, which I enjoy as much as the next person most of the time.

As I followed reports of Disrupt from my train to NYC, Arrington got a lot more clear today about some veiled comments he made last week when the NYT‘s David Carr took him to task. The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) is also an investor, including in startups and in True Ventures, where GigaOm’s Om Malik is a venture partner. GigaOm is a contributor to the New York Times. True Ventures is an investor in the CrunchFund, and so on. It’s not the NYT’s first conflict and it won’t be the last. Usually, the NYT mentions direct conflicts in stories rather than a blanket disclaimer/disclosure but that’s not always the case. The company’s been an investor in the Red Sox and Fenway Park for years (an investment its been selling off for financial reasons), a well-known conflict. Om’s situation is more problematic in this context although he, too, has been upfront.

As careless as I think Armstrong got last week when he tried to carve out an even bigger exception for Arrington, he was careful on that stage last year not to grant full dispensation when Arrington asked: “Can I still say whatever I like?” “We’ll try to be as hands-off as possible,” Armstrong replied. Sure enough, last week — and it seems now — the TechCrunch staff had the kind of editorial independence oh which dreams (and nightmares) are made, saying, tweeting and writing anything they wanted on AOL’s dime without so much as a gentle nudge. Some of that is likely to continue in the post-Arrington era as TechCrunch asserts itself within AOL.

Here’s the carefully worded statement from AOL communications chief Maureen Sullivan:

“The TechCrunch acquisition has been a success for AOL and for our shareholders, and we are very excited about its future. Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund. Michael is a world-class entrepreneur and we look forward to supporting his new endeavor through our investment in his venture fund. Erick Schonfeld has been named the editor of TechCrunch. TechCrunch will be expanding its editorial leadership in the coming months.”

.

Coda: One mission accomplished — plenty of attention on Disrupt — Arrington was on center stage as expected after the announcement. And, to be expected, he got one of his points across in true Arrington fashion, sporting a t-shirt with the caption “unpaid blogger.”

Correction: True Ventures is not an investor in the CrunchFund. I regret the error.

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Updated: AOL has issued a statement intended to head off any charges of conflict of interest related to Arrington’s new endeavors: “In light of Michael’s new responsibilities as a partner in CrunchFund, Arianna and Michael are announcing a search (both internal and external) for a Managing Editor to oversee day-to-day editorial operations and editorial standards at TechCrunch. Michael will remain founding editor and when he writes he will continue to transparently and openly disclose any conflicts of interest.”

The duo is reportedly looking to assemble an all-star team of Silicon Valley’s major VC firms and high profile tech executives. In particular, some of the firms being talked about include Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Sequoia Capital. AOL also appears to be part of the arrangement.

Before he started TechCrunch six years ago, Arrington had been an angel investor. He ceased actively investing in tech companies about two years amid sundry accusations of conflicts of interest. But that moratorium didn’t last long, as he began investing in companies this past year. Arrington was also named a limited partner in funds managed by Benchmark Capital and SoftTechVC.

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It’s a curious first step for Hamoui, who created Churn Labs in Irvine, Calif. earlier this year as a way to test out ideas in overlooked areas. In this case, it lets Hamoui explore the notion of whether people will find some value in sharing a unique digital character between friends. But the really intriguing thing is the technology built into the app, which allows people to transfer one gnome between devices. Users can view a gnome on another device using their view finder on the app and when they line up the gnome to an outline, it is “lifted” to the second device. Hamoui also showed how devices can share pictures using the same technology. Using a view finder, a person can drag a picture from one app onto the image of the second device, which receives it. Pretty cool stuff.

Hamoui said Churn Labs wasn’t necessarily designed to make a lot of money. But it’s built to explore these interesting ideas and see where they can go. “For all of us, this is what we want to do. Whether it’s something ridiculous or silly or something more serious; this is what we enjoy doing,” he said.

Other than Gnostop Gnomes, here is a look at some of the other start-ups that caught my eye today:

Weotta is throwing its hat into the local recommendation market. It builds an entire itinerary for the night based on your personal interests and simple information you feed into the website. If you enter in plans for a date with a classy vibe, Weotta will take what it knows about you and create possible itineraries like a dinner, movie and drinks afterward. It’s not curated information but all derived from smart algorithms. Once you create an itinerary, you can quickly create a Facebook event and invite others. The service will link to outside reservation and ticketing services such as Open Table and Tickermaster. The events can be shaped by what Weotta knows about you from your Facebook profile. And itineraries can be altered using real-time recommendations from friends.

Weotta will have to provide some good recommendations right off the bat, things people might not have thought about themselves. And it will need to be really tailored to people to create some personal plans for them. Weotta said it will also allow you to collaborate with fellow users on an itinerary so the plans reflect the interests of multiple people. This is a busy space but I like the idea of pulling it all together in one service.

Sonar is looking to help uncover the hidden connections between people at venues. The idea is that it will help you find people to interact with that you’re already connected with in some way. It’s a cool idea, bringing your online social graph into live venues so you can figure out interesting people to chat up.

When a user arrives at a place, you can announce your presence with Sonar and the app will tell you who is also there that you’re connected to. So if you have someone there that shares a Facebook, Foursquare or Twitter friend, you’ll be able to see them. You can also look up a quick bio to see if the person is someone you might want to meet. If you do, you can send out a preformed invitation to chat citing the person you have in common.

Sonar said it only uses publicly available data so users must make that private if they don’t want that to be used. But I think this is a cool way to discover people around you that you might not have realized were there.

Rexly is stepping in where Apple has failed with Ping. It’s a media recommendation engine that tries to make smart use of user behavior data and social information to push out good suggestions on what to buy. The service, which works with iTunes music to start, builds an activity stream based on every action a user does in iTunes and allows users to share and comment on content. Then it creates recommendations based on your actions and those of your friends. But it does it in an intelligent way, allowing a user to identify up to six trusted people to follow, whose tastes will have more sway in a user’s recommendations.

While this only works with iTunes music for now, it’s meant to scale up and be a service that recommends movies, TV and books from Netflix, Amazon and other services. And that will make it even more appealing as a cross-platform recommendation platform that touches various forms of media. I think Apple’s meager attempt with Ping shows there’s more work to be done in this space. That’s why I like Rexly. It has a way to be smart about social signals, applying more weight to trusted friends and it has a cross-platform play that other single providers won’t or can’t implement.

Image courtesy of TechCrunch

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