Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.
When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.
It's a tragedy for whole society.
Now it’s far more corporate.
I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.
For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.
There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.
And hopefully with it, the word "blogosphere".