Lori is hardly innocent. Although she may have not forwarded my email, she DOES (or did) represent PPP, and is therefore part of that organization. Secondly, she asked me numerous illegal questions about my family and personal life during the phone interview. Hardly professional. That was my first “red flag” before I even saw the PPP videos.

You again commit potential libel yourself, not that I care, when you accuse me of slurring her name. Without fact.

You also say that you “know” I think Peter’s email was abusive. I never said that. Get YOUR facts straight, Lucia. That’s Arrington’s words, not mine.

No one is questioning your right to publish nonsense, Lucia. That’s the beauty of WordPress and cheap domain names. Have at it.

You are a big hypocrite for holding Arrington to a higher standard than you hold yourself to. Personally, I enjoy conversing about issues, but not if the person is holding everyone to false standards and using false sentiment (i.e. “Good luck”) in their writing.

I’d bother to continue monitoring this thread, but considering this blog isn’t even ranked by Google, I’m guessing you have another motive here. Does anyone even read this thing?

Thanks for the comment.

Thanks for confirming that you sent PPP the email by way of a blind cc. Thanks for confirming that you sent your email correspondence to Arrington. Thanks for confirming that Arrington didn’t check the details of his story but simply assumed them. Thanks for letting us know that, had he bothered to check, you would have clarified for him. Thanks for confirming that you are not an engineer. In all, thanks for confirming that Arrington did, indeed, get all his facts wrong.

As to the bits that are opinion: I know you think Peter was abusive to you, but I disagree. I find nothing in his portion of the email exchange abusive. I consider the email you sent PPP hostile and abusive. As you said, people who read the PDF can make up their mind. That PDF is available both through a link here and one at Techcrunch.

On the issue of reporting true facts vs. false ones: Evidently you think only journalists have an obligation to try make sure their “facts” are true. So, you think Arrington, who you think is not a journalist, should be permitted to post entirely false statements for the sake of brevity and/or making his story.

I disagree.

I suspect Lori Smiles will also disagree and will likely be a bit miffed to find Arrington told his many, many readers that she violated her profesional ethics by forwarded your email to PPP. She probably will be even more miffed when she googles her name to find this slur re-appearing on numerous blogs.

The truth is: Lori did not forward your email. You sent it to PPP. Mike Arrington didn’t even try to find out the truth before he published his slur on her professional ethics.

But even if you were correct to believe that Arrington has every right to publish false statements that smear Lori’s professional reputation, I believe I have an equal right to point out that Arrington based story on a set of “facts” that were simply false.

Good luck with your non-job hunt that involves discussing jobs opportunities with recruiters.

Your anger here seems mostly at Arrington, although for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Again, like many who posted to the T/C comments, you seem to think he has some duty or obligation to uphold some standard of journalistic ethics – that he must check, and double-check his facts, that he must ask probing questions, that he must write pieces that are not incendiary in nature, etc. Except that he’s not a journalist and never claimed to be. I fail to understand how you, or especially a blogger of any merit, can write stuff like the above on their OWN blog and think TechCrunch should just roll over and become the boring New York Times. Your own post here – full of vitriol, opinion, and all without the same probing questions or fact-finding that you demand of others (i.e. you never sent me an email or called me to verify some of your incorrect statements above) – is taken as it should be… a blog post by someone who knows how to type and use FTP. Big deal. We all do it. And we all have the common sense to see it for what it is – just that. You are practically advocating some kind of outside regulation of the blogosphere when you start imputing these standards of yours to other bloggers – standards to which you don’t adhere to either. Just read your own blog (as I have) with the same critical eye and you’d see that.

Before I clarify a few things you wrote, it occurs to me that anyone here could just go and read the actual exchange just as quickly as they could your commentary about it. The whole idea of a review is to encapsulate a larger volume of work so that others can get an idea of what it is about. Of course, it helps to be accurate, but brevity is a worthwhile attribute to shoot for as well. This isn’t a review – it’s a rant. Just like mine was. Talk about calling the kettle black.

In response to your “points”:

1. I didn’t “send” the email to PPP, in so much as I copied them when replying to Lori. In other words, I’m all for open communication and didn’t feel comfortable saying things about a company that could later be interpreted as a “back-stabbing”. If I’m going to say something, it is going to be to their face. I would have sent it only to Ted Murphy’s email box if I’d had it, since the email primarily discussed him and his company. If it’s PPP’s practice to share their internal emails with the “entire company”, that’s their business. I can’t recall working in a place where I got to see emails of customer complaints and responses of job candidates to HR, but so be it. I think Arrington just naturally assumed that’s how it happened. Had he asked me, I would have corrected that assumption. And I even took the time to do so in the comment thread later. Not to bash Arrington, since I think it was a natural assumption, just to be fair to those who had previously bashed Lori for forwarding it. As I mentioned there, I didn’t have a problem if it had been forwarded by Lori, but as far as I know, she didn’t do so.

2. Here’s YOUR first assumption that you got wrong. “You should have called! You should have asked!” Isn’t that what you told Arrington? I had no interest in a response from Peter. Even a precursory reading of my response to him would demonstrate that. It was pretty black and white. I blind-copied Arrington on my response to Peter – without comment or introduction – and all on the same email. In other words, there was no waiting for a response. I never expected one. The blind-copy was on the same exact email. I felt he should know what this guy, a VP of PPP, was saying about him. That was my only interest in doing so – full-disclosure. At least I copied PPP in my comments when I said “negative” things about them to Lori. Peter did not, as far as I know, copy Arrington. So, I did on my response back. I have no idea who Arrington is – beyond what we all know of him. I had to hunt around on his website trying to find an email address, and even then, I assumed it would probably get flagged as spam. I didn’t forward it to anyone else. The only reason the outside world even knows about it is because he asked me if I had a problem with him publishing it if he removed the email addresses. My single response: “I don’t have a problem with it. I just thought you should see the hate these guys have for you (ha ha)”. Quite frankly, based on what I see here, you would have happily published a similar episode if it fell within your bank of opinions. Mike has an opinion about PPP (which I happen to share). Would I have written the article differently? Sure. But then again, that’s why I’m little ol’ me and that’s why he’s who he is. And nobody cares what I have to say (or you) compared to him. He got that way by being opinionated and being outspoken. I don’t know why this is such a surprise to you (as it seems above).

3. In response to number three, you are just playing semantics here. If you want to call an attack a defense, whatever. You chose a very non-abrasive quote of Peter’s. Any person who cares can just go read Peter’s whole reply. It speaks for itself. And I even corrected myself on that one paragraph you quoted in my response to Peter: “Okay, that’s my fault for being upset at Lori & Co. for wasting 3 hours of my time on a lark. First, I shouldn’t have said ‘no brains’. I didn’t mean their technical skills. I fully believe you have a talented staff in that vein. I meant ‘no brains’ in the aspect of not having the common sense to refuse to work until 3 AM for a web project.” But you didn’t quote that, did you?

4. Again, semantics. By a stretch of the imagination, I suppose you can say what you said. But the practical reality for those of us who live in the technical world is that recruiters are nothing more than an outsourced HR department. Lori billed herself – not as a headhunter – but a recruiter for PPP. So, if you want to define here when you feel a candidate becomes a candidate, feel free. I would say, as do millions of other people, that when a representative of a company contacts me and asks me to send them my resume, and does two separate phone interviews with me, that I’m a candidate. It doesn’t matter to me whether it is an actual employee of PPP, as long as it is a representative. Why you get all upset about this is beyond me. I could make a lot of analogies here to prove the point, but it is what it is. Semantics over nothing.

You also put words in Arrington’s mouth: saying that he thinks I’m a “smart engineer”. That is untrue. I never billed myself as an engineer. He was probably thinking software engineer. And I’ve been around enough of those guys to know that just being “techie” doesn’t make you smart. You don’t like my email to PPP, but you do the same here – proclaiming that no one is going to take Arrington’s staffing recommendations seriously. Huh? The guy runs his own company. What are you even talking about?

You do the same smears you accuse Arrington of throughout this thread: “Salberg is probably still on the job market”. I wasn’t on the job market to begin with – I work for myself. For all your badgering of Arrington, at least he fully admits that he wants to see PPP close its doors. You accuse him of being unethical, and yet he fully discloses his own opinion – as did I in my two emails that started this whole debacle. And then, here and on the T/C comment board, you go into lengthy word-dissecting “reviews” of Arrington’s post. You can almost here the screams of “Where’s the justice?” in between your lines here.

I don’t entirely get you. I’ll admit that I think I would like you were we to meet face-to-face. I read quite a bit of your stuff (just trying to figure out who the heck you are). Mostly because you were one of the more lengthy responses to the initial post and because out of the 140 some comments on T/C yesterday about this, there are only a a handful (about a dozen) that point to actual blogs. I kept thinking I was going to stumble upon a “I hate Arrignton” thread somewhere in your past, but I’ve yet to do so. People all just need to get along. I don’t like Ted Murphy’s management style (if you can even call it a style) and I don’t like his company. Big deal. So what. Nothing against him as a person, nor would I think he would take it personally. Peter did – which surprised me and a lot of people, but as I started off my response to him, I have no problem with him. All this drama, but I for one would have no problem just shooting the breeze with anyone involved (so far). Some people take complaints about their operations too seriously, I think. You know, call me crazy, but they COULD actually improve PPP and make it a really great company. It’s happened at many other companies. Then we could all be wrong (about its future demise). But improvements can’t happen when everyone is running around playing “PR” rep for the company rather than changing the real problems.