Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and I were at an Orange party tonight. His Amazon Kindle didn’t show up yet (it comes tomorrow) so I showed it to him. He hated the UI, so I turned on my cell phone and recorded him goofing around a bit.

Etch a Sketch is better, huh? Yikes.

Oh, Mike’s always saying my videos are boring (although he admitted to me that he watches them). I wonder what he’ll say about my videos now that he’s been on one?

Oh #2 Ben Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist ACTUALLY HAS TWO SONY READERS and gives us his 12-hour video review of the Kindle and he disagrees with Mike, saying the navigation is “sexy cool.”

I’ve noticed that PR types are getting very astute with dealing with bloggers lately and getting their wares discussed on TechMeme.

First they’ll call Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Make sure he’s briefed first (Mike doesn’t like to talk about news that someone else broke first, so they’ll make sure he is always in the first group to get to share something with you all). Then they’ll brief “second-tier” bloggers like me, Om, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web, and a variety of others. Embargo us all so we can’t publish before Mike does. Then they’ll have a party the night of the launch where they’ll get everyone else to come — if they get even a few bloggers to talk about the new thing then it’ll hit TechMeme by midnight.

I usually ignore the PR at this stage of the game. My business doesn’t rely on being first like TechCrunch requires. My most popular video lately was one with Six Apart which didn’t have ANY news. People just like to hear smart people at smart companies discuss where they are going.

But lately I’ve seen a new PR trend. One where companies don’t show their cool stuff to the A-list bloggers in expectation for coverage. Kyte.tv was a good example of this. They just turned on new features last week and let the bloggers discover it organically (when I saw the new features I knew I had to go over and get the scoop).

This didn’t get Kyte onto TechCrunch or TechMeme. But I think it is an interesting stratagy — one of “don’t talk, do.”

On the other hand, I agree with Dave Winer that what Loic Le Meur is doing with Seesmic is brilliant. Loic joins us every evening on Twitter. Hands out invite codes to whoever asks nicely. Then watches our first videos, and puts the best stuff into an edited video.

Loic is playing a PR game at a level that I’ve not seen in these parts.

Here’s a fun game: what is PodTech trying to keep off of TechMeme? Hmmm! :-)

Oh, don’t believe that PR is getting astute about getting lots of bloggers to talk? Yesterday I was emailed dozens of press releases. Almost all of which have been discussed by bloggers on my link blog today.

Experience a little bit of the TechCrunch party — 30 seconds of audio at a time.

David Weekly of PBWiki with a little adoption news about their wiki service.

OpenDNS’s CEO, David Ulevitch (a little hard to hear, but he was telling me why OpenDNS is a cool service — I’m going to try it out and get over there for an interview).

Ash Damle, CEO of Medgle, a personalized medical search engine, explains why his service is unique.

Bradley Horowitz, of Yahoo (the guy who bought Flickr) talks to me about what he’s excited about.

Dave Winer talks to me about TwitterGram.

Ryan Hoge and Doug Pierce of Microsoft talk to me about FolderShare and LiveFolders from Microsoft.

And before the party Larry Magid (famous tech journalist) told us that he’s partnering with PodTechww on a show called Digital Crossroads.

Michael Arrington is right. Google’s bloggers are learning an important lesson today.

When you speak in public and everyone knows who you work for you ARE representing your company. Even if you think you aren’t.

I know lots of you disagree, but you’re wrong. I’ve seen people get fired for things they’ve done on their own time, at a bar. Or a party after a conference.

Yeah, you can put some distance between you and your employer and keep things a little calmer if you write a disclaimer at the top of your posts. Something like “I am speaking for myself, not for my employer.”

But even then I still am building a mental model of your employer based on what you’re writing.

If you are a jerk, I’m going to assume your employer hires jerks.

I’ve noticed that people respond to ME differently because of how someone else at PodTech treated them. And I definitely hear it when I’ve been a jerk to someone else, or when I say something that reflects poorly on PodTech. There’s more than 30 people working at PodTech now and many of them don’t appreciate it when I write something idiotic (which is often).

I’m human, I make mistakes. So do employees at Google.

But those of us who work for corporations need to recognize that every word we write is seen as coming from the company in some way. It might not be right, but that’s the way it is.

If you don’t like it go work for yourself. Of course then you won’t get the flow that comes with being able to say “I’m a doctor working at Google.”

OK, yesterday when i wrote I’d add all of you as my Facebook friends I had about 600 friends. Today I have more than 1,300. Tons of you wrote you love my blog. But most of you don’t comment. In fact, out of the 700 people who added me as a Facebook friend I can only see about 20 that have left a comment — ever.

What is fascinating to me is now I have a new way to understand my audience. Where you live. Where you go to school. What your hobbies are. What you look like (most have posted their pictures).

Plus, I have another source of interesting blogs and interesting information coming to me. Thanks for participating! I’m still adding new friends, by the way.

It’s easier than getting into a TechCrunch party (Mike Arrington just put another 100 tickets out on TechCrunch and sold out in eight minutes. Amazing! He announced the sale on Twitter).

I asked people on Twitter about why most people don’t comment and got back a variety of responses from “requires me to think” to “shy.” Anyway, why don’t YOU comment on my blog? It’s quite obvious that there’s a much larger group of you that don’t comment than do.

Tonight I was driving home from a family party with Patrick. We were listening to KGO Radio. AM-810. It’s the best rated talk station in the San Francisco area (and is among the best rated station in the world). Its signal can be heard from Alaska to Mexico. The show we were listening to was Bill Wattenburg.

Two ads on KGO caught my ear. The first was an ad for Pat Vitucci and AIG, here’s a list of some of KGO’s advertisers. It was read live by Bill Wattenburg. He endorsed Pat’s seminar.

The second was by Leo Laporte, who came on and endorsed GoToMyPC in his own voice.

I’ve heard Leo endorse other products on KGO recently too in advertisements, including a security dongle (Kevin Mitnick also did such an endorsement).

KGO Radio is owned by Disney Corporation.

These two examples of advertisements are FAR further along the endorsement line than what was done by Federated Media. The ads that caused the TechMeme outcry were NOT endorsements at all, but were just bloggers talking about an advertising slogan and even then weren’t told what to say.

But the ads on KGO radio go FAR further. Most of the ads that hosts on KGO read are from a script. It’s pretty clear that the company is paying those ad readers to say specific things.

Now, I know Leo is pretty high integrity guy. I doubt he’d do an ad for a product he really hated, but would he really endorse GoToMyPC if he weren’t being paid? Might he endorse a different technique? Or teach people how to do such a thing without a commercial product? I’ve listened to Leo a lot (I used to help run his chat room back when he was a host himself on KGO radio back in the mid 1990s) and I could see him teaching people how to do it themselves without buying a third-party product to let you remotely access your files.

One thing, though, all these ads are totally disclosed. It’s very clear they are paid advertisements and are separate from the editorial copy. It’s very clear that Leo is getting paid to take these editorial stances.

But, still, why isn’t everyone yelling and screaming about these kinds of ads on professional media (this is one of the world’s top radio stations, owned by a huge multi-national corporation)?

Here’s why? Beating up on Disney won’t get you any links. Won’t get you on TechMeme. Won’t insert you into a conversation. Won’t build your traffic.

In fact, Leo is so popular and credible that beating up on him might cause a major blowback the way that beating up on Macs usually gets you hundreds of angry commenters (ask John Dvorak about that one).

Now you know why Valleywag is still pushing this story front and center (even Larry Page, cofounder of Google, arriving at FooCamp in a helicopter couldn’t push this story off of the front page over there).

Translation: there’s lots of professional endorsing that’s been going on for years (this isn’t new). As long as it’s disclosed I don’t see the problem with it.

On the other hand, Jeff Jarvis has a major problem with these kinds of advertisements. I respect Jeff’s stance but don’t think Jeff’s stance will be followed by everyone.

For me, I will disclose when I’m doing stuff for money. I’m not going to be as pure as Jeff Jarvis is, sorry, but when I’m not I’ll let you know so you can make up your own mind about what I’m saying.

UPDATE: Leo Laporte explained why he does radio endorsements in my comments and that he won’t endorse a product that he doesn’t already use (and has turned down requests for endorsements from other companies because of that). I believe him when he says this, too, because I’ve seen him turn down advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

You all thought that Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch party last Friday was big? Wait until you see the BlogCamp in Chennai on September 9-10. I was trying to get there, but it just won’t work out (but I’ll be joining via video link).

How do I know it’ll be big? Because everything in India gets big almost instantly. Americans can’t understand the population density of places like India and China unless they visit. I know one guy, Anand, who runs a .NET user group. It hit 1,000 members in the first year. It took the user group in Silicon Valley several years to hit that level.

I’m still recovering from last night’s shindig. You know, what’s the deal with these parties? They are getting to be media events, that’s all. Be seen, and see. Take photos or videos, get videoed or photoed. Talk about tech? I tried. But it was just too noisy to have a decent conversation on video.

Don’t worry about missing these. They are just great ways to collect business cards and meet the hot geeks. The bubble is back!

Thanks to Scott Beale who was the official photographer and Thomas Hawk and Dan Farber and Gabe Rivera and the other people who put up photos. Here’s the photos that have been uploaded to Flickr with the TechCrunch7 tag.

Eddie says I have a cooler tripod than he does, mouse over this photo to see why.

First, stare into my lens and say hi!

This is me begging Nick Douglas, of Valleywag, to blog some dirt about my book co-author Shel Israel. Really, no. I was just asking him how he snuck into the party and what the story would be. He didn’t have a good answer to either. In between us is Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme. He explained a little bit about how TechMeme works. Lots of people think he does that site by hand I learned. Not true. It’s all algorithms baby!

Guy Kawasaki is always the life of the party. Whenever he’s around you feel good.

Thomas Hawk captures me with the man of the evening: Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. Lots of people were asking me about the “Oakridge” Apple shirt. Oh, that’s from the Apple store opening at Oakridge Mall in Silicon Valley. It was my way of saying “I don’t go for the status stores like Palo Alto or San Francisco but go for the ghetto Valley Apple stores. Of course Oakridge isn’t too ghetto anymore (I once worked at a camera store in that mall and my dad lives a mile or so away). I wore the Apple shirt so my son, Patrick, would think I was “cool” cause he thinks everything from Apple is cool. I’m such a sell out. I can just hear Patrick saying “dad, a shirt won’t make you cool.”

And another one from Flickr:

Speaking of Mike, he was having a good time posing for pictures.

What happens when you open a laptop at a party like this? Funding event!

Hi boss! Damn you, use both hands like I showed you. Otherwise you get too much camera shake on those little Samsung Sanyo Xacti cameras. (They are fun, cause they record straight to SD cards which makes your workflow a lot nicer, just drag onto Blip.TV and you have a video blog).

The music was cool, thanks to Tom Conrad, this guy, of Pandora.

TechCrunch 7 food was better and more plentiful than earlier Crunch parties, but nothing spectacular so don’t feel jealous. The wine, though, was great and I got a poster designed by Hugh Macleod, marketing genius.

Last night I sauntered to San Francisco for the Valleyschwag party. While there, Thomas Hawk, talented photographer, made several photos. His work is amazing considering there was very little light. These make it look like we were in a studio, rather than munching on chicken skewers in an office.

What’s his trick? Well, he has a Canon 5D. $3,000 camera body. Then he only uses prime lenses. No zooms. Why does that matter? Well, they are fast, so he can shoot in low light without a flash. And they are usually sharper than zooms too.

Downside? When you switch lenses dust gets in and settles on the imaging sensor. He told me he has to clean his sensor at least once a week. Anyway, enjoy the photos.

Here I am with the 18-year-old software developer behind Zoomr, Kris Tate. You know he’s hot when even his competitors are singing his praises:

Here I am with Nivi, who is one smart dude. And Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, my favorite “next Web” news site. I sucked up to him again last night.

In this one Tantek Celik and Kelly Goto talk with me about the downsides of traveling around the world on the conference circuit (and some deep personal stuff, along the lines of my mom’s death). Tantek is the main engineer at Technorati (he also wrote IE on the Mac) and Kelly is one of the most talented designers in the world.

Oh, and no SF geek party would be complete without Gabe Rivera, the guy who developed TechMeme. Yes, he’s wearing an “echo chamber” Hugh Macleod original shirt — I had to point to the Echo Chamber. Heheh. Irina wears the best shirts, though.

More over on Thomas Hawk’s Flickr account and Thomas’ blog.

I'm listening to more podcasts lately. Imagine that! But there's some really awesome stuff out there. First, I'm bummed that I had to miss tonight's Digg 3.0 launch party. I thought I was going to make it, but Maryam wants to look at a house so I had to fly back this morning and she's on her way down to the Valley.

But, if you miss the party you can still get the good info thanks to Mike Arrington and Richard MacManus who interviewed Digg's founders. Well worth listening to. Digg is the hottest community site out there right now (they sent me more traffic than anyone except for the BBC).