If you want your IT news story to be really read then put away the phone numbers of those Trade magazines. A real hit is now considered to be blog site Techcrunch. This website is another one of those trailblazing blog sites which joins The Huffington Post and Guido Fawkes – beating the official news websites at their own game.

In truth, what began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, has actually now morphed into one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry. Founder Michael Arrington had lived through the internet goldrush as a lawyer and entrepreneur before deciding that writing about new companies was more of an opportunity than starting them himself. His site is now ranked the third-most popular blog in the world by search engine Technorati, spawning a mini-empire of websites and conferences as a result. Business Week named Arrington one of the 25 most influential people on the web, and Techcrunch has even scored interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain.

With a horde of hungry geeks and big money investors online, Techcrunch is the largest of a wave of technology-focused blog publishers to tap into the market - GigaOm, PaidContent and Mashable among them - but often proves more contentious than its rivals, thanks to Arrington's aggressive relationships with traditional media and his conflicts of interest as an investor himself.