It’s tempting to blame the victim. In May, a twentysomething French hacker broke into several Twitter employees’ e-mail accounts and stole a trove of meeting notes, strategy documents, and other confidential scribbles. The hacker eventually gave the stash to TechCrunch, which has since published notes from meetings in which Twitter execs discussed their very lofty goals.

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Paul Carr, who started writing for TechCrunch not long ago, is an entertaining writer, and he often puts his finger on issues that others tend to avoid in their headlong rush towards whatever is shiny and new, which is why I’m glad Mike Arrington hired him. But I think his latest rant against “citizen journalism” is misplaced. In the piece, which is entitled “After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth,” Carr talks about how a soldier on the base where the shootings occurred last week was posting to Twitter throughout the ordeal.

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Regardless of what you think of Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington’s ethics, what has been revealed via the Techcrunch #twittergate is some of the most fascinating information to have hit the mediasphere in a long time. As Cult of the Amateur author A.J. Keen puts it, referring to the leak, technology start-ups have become the “hottest celebrities in America… receiving the same kind of obsessionally intimate coverage from the media that was once reserved for kings of pop like Michael Jackson or Elvis.”

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The hacking of Twitter CEO Evan Williams’s email account has sparked an ethics debate after TechCrunch said that it would publish some of the confidential documents that the hacker leaked.

The brouhaha began when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington blogged that a French hacker calling himself “Hacker Croll” said he had broken into Mr. Williams’s account as well as those of Mr. Williams’s wife and two Twitter employees.

An English translation of a post on French blog Koren shows that the hacker claims he gained access to Mr. Williams’s Gmail, PayPal, Amazon (AMZN) and AT&T (T) accounts, among others, and thus was able to find documents containing Twitter employee food preferences, credit card numbers, phone numbers and salaries.

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Brooke Hammerling (publicist) and Erin McKean (entrepreneur) are in a Sand Hill Road conference room, hashing out plans to unveil Ms. McKean’s new Web site, Wordnik.

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

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When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting. After all, TechCrunch’s founder, Mike Arrington, was a constant target of the Gawker Media blog and once famously ejected a Valleywag photographer from a party he was co-hosting simply because of the publication the photographer worked for.

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Once again, Google (GOOG) is the favorite bogeyman responsible for the rapid deterioration in the health of the news industry. This time it is Nick Carr doing the finger-pointing, describing Google as the most powerful middleman in news:

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Yesterday, as Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington was leaving the DLD conference venue in Munich, one of the conference attendees walked up to him and spat in his face. I’ll say that again. One of the attendees. Walked up to him. And spat. In. His. Face. And then without a word, the attacker turned on his patent leather heel and vanished back into the crowd.

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By the end of 2008, venture capital had been officially declared dead. Start-ups were laying people off so fast that even TechCrunch couldn’t manage to keep up. University Endowments and Foundations, the source of the “capital” in venture capital, were hemorrhaging so badly from their public company investments that many long-time believers in “alternative assets” declared a moratorium on venture capital. And the IPO market was a distant memory. Good times!

Welcome 2009. The public markets remain closed. Venture investors and the investors in venture investors remain “challenged.” Follow-on financings have become increasingly difficult, in some instances impossible. And, while there may well be light at the end of the tunnel, it would appear that we haven’t gotten far enough down the tunnel yet to see that light.

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If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover 10 friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both start-ups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s (YHOO) experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit.

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It hasn’t even been a month since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a German blog that growth, not monetization, was the priority for the social-networking site. In fact, he even went so far as to say that he didn’t see a revenue plan coming into play for three more years.

But now, as TechCrunch digs up info on Facebook’s financials, it appears that Facebook may not even make it to 2011 unless they can drum up more cash–either through an accelerated revenue model or more investment dollars before the entire global economy erodes further. In response, Facebook basically responds by telling VentureBeat that it’s doing just fine–thank you very much–while other sources say that something must be wrong with the Techcrunch calculator.

Recognizing that advertising on Facebook has offered “dismal” returns, some bloggers (Techmeme) are suggesting that maybe a subscription model–nothing too crazy, mind you–might be in order. At least one has said that the only thing holding Facebook back from imposing fees is a lack of guts.

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Razr anyone? Motorola can’t even give those things away anymore. The once-proud company reported horrible earnings today, with sales down 21% and a net loss of $194 million. But the big takeaway was the 39% collapse in its mobile phone business. Mobile device revenues in the quarter dropped $2.1 billion compared to last year.

Coincidentally enough, that is almost exactly how much Apple made last quarter over the past three quarters on iPhone sales. That figure comes to $2.3 billion (including lumped-in sales of Apple TVs, which likely made up a very small portion of that total).

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After the derision that greeted the New York Times’s blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I’m probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.

Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters–including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch–but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.

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There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Web site with eight games (chess, backgammon, sudoku, dominoes, bingo, spades, hearts and video poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.

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