Michael Arrington, Esq.

TechCrunch Site Makes Arrington A Power Broker headlines the feature article in the Wall Street Journal.

Two years ago, Mr. Arrington, a onetime lawyer and Internet executive, was living the life of a surf bum in southern California. Today, the 36-year-old has become one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. Like a latter-day Henry Blodget, the onetime star Wall Street analyst who helped fuel the late 1990s dot-com frenzy, Mr. Arrington uses his TechCrunch blog to determine the destinies of new start-ups and to fan the flames of the current Internet boom...

These days, Mr. Arrington often stays up as late as 4 a.m. pounding out pieces for TechCrunch. He is also building a miniempire of Web sites. In January, he started a site focused on mobile devices and services, then followed it up with a high-tech gadgets site and, in August, a job-postings site. Eventually, he hopes to amass a network of Web sites in addition to his main blog so that he can compete with Web powerhouse CNET Networks Inc.

TechCrunch had about a million global page views in September, compared with 13 million for CNET News, according to comScore Networks Inc.

Mr. Arrington says he believes TechCrunch's numbers are actually higher, and he adds: "I want more page views than CNET in two years."

Michael Arrington, the founder and writer of TechCrunch, is a real good get for any Web 2.0 confabb or media get-together these days. Like Paris Hilton says, "He's hot."

And Denise Howell got him as one of her guests for This Week in Law, the podcast, er, netcast, with Ernie Svenson and Cathy Kirkman who, right then during the TWiL interview, unabashedly cajoled Arrington into making some sort of celebrity appearance at her upcoming Blog Law seminar in New York on the 16th and 17th this week. Talk about social networking!