I don’t tend to write about the online world a great deal as in most instances it isn’t really that interesting, but there has been a minor huha at TechCrunch in the past day that has peaked my attention.

To cut a long story short, the TechCrunch blogger had received an email from a PR guy about the company he represented.  TechCrunch didn’t regard the story as something they would write about, PR guy was a bit snotty in his response and so on.  Normally you would expect that to be the end of things.

Alas the blogger in question then decided to write about the exchange, publishing the email, with the name of the PR guy in the subject of the blog, before finishing off the piece with a suggetsion that the client look elsewhere for a PR rep.  Cue a large number of negative comments critisizing the blogger for publishing a private communication.

That several TechCrunch writers then commented themselves, reinforcing the lack of class shown by the original writer merely dug the hole deeper.  Now obviously TechCrunch are one of the biggest sites in this sector on the web so it’s quite likely that this episode won’t effect them at all in terms of popularity.

Hubris is not a nice quality to have however, and it would certainly be nice if they got back to covering the technology sector rather than snidey point scoring like this.