Arrington force-feeds CrunchGear and MobileCrunch to you

When Jobs spread the word about his weight-loss this afternoon, Next Web editors Zee and Boris immediately started typing an article. Since they’re not sharing an office (Zee lives in London, Boris in Amsterdam) and both were utterly excited by the words from Mr. Apple himself, they didn’t see each other’s post. Thus sharp readers might have seen two posts about Jobs’ announcement on The Next Web (We deleted Boris’ post. At first he was devastated, but he’s feeling better now).

Anyhow, an hour or so later Boris called for my attention as he thought TechCrunch had made the same mistake. He noticed two posts about Jobs in his feedreader. One titled “Steve Responds to Rumors with a Steve-Note: I’m just Thin” and a second one called “Steve Jobs Explains His Weight Loss in Healthnote“. Did Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs pull the same trick as Zee and Boris?

Nah, it’s just Arrington force-feeding you some CrunchGear and MobileCrunch news. See the graphic Boris made to check out how TechCrunch’s 1.7 million RSS readers also get a load of John Biggs and the likes. Some of these articles also appear on the recently redesigned frontpage of TechCrunch.

This raises an interesting question: is it OK to show your readers posts from other blogs you own? Some readers are obviously not amused and speak of violating trust and all that. Others just ask the same question like me. I believe you can of course share news from your blog network, but doing without any notice or graphic hints is less stylish – if not confusing.

After all, you haven’t asked for Crunchgear posts, have you? Maybe you read Gizmodo for the latest gadget news because you like the tone of voice better. Who knows? Arrington doesn’t, that’s for sure. So there’s no motivation for him (except promotion) to shove it under your face.