Here’s a shocker, though it needn’t really be – Michael Arrington has reportedly hired a CEO for the Crunch Network. Heather Harde, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, will take that position, Om Malik reports and FIM confirms. It’s news to me but I presume it’s true. Sounds smart.

My six months at TechCrunch were a whole lot of fun. Working at a pre-funding startup in the crowded media sharing market as I do now is actually much less stressful than TC was, believe it or not. I filled in at TechCrunch for two weeks last month and had a good time, we’ll see if I fill in again what it’s like to work with Heather. That could be fun.

I wish all parties involved the best of luck, I’ll be very interested to see what changes the network undergoes. Maybe Mike will get more sleep, he certainly deserves it. Good luck Heather!

Just watched a really self-satisfied white guy on stage say things like “we all want to be affluent, but we want guilt free affluence” while showing slides of poor black people around the world. His point about helping people deal with their worst issues in order to provide a springboard for self determination was fair enough, but the presentation had an icky feel to it. It was far more politically conservative than most of the people in the audience appeared willing to admit.

Whatever. WorldChanging is an interesting enough web site to check out every once in awhile. Want a cooler one? It’s less optimistic, but it’s smarter, more honest and less politically retrograde -check out Grain.org. I’m sure the Grain folks wouldn’t say these kinds of things about WorldChanging – but I’m not involved, so I can.

That’s the plan anyway. Alex Williams and I are headed down Thursday afternoon to cover South by Southwest for SplashCast. We’re both speaking on panels as well. He organized the first panel of the whole conference – all about Snakes on a Plane!

Anyway, we’re going to work our tails off to be as on top of the news there as possible. I think we’ll be able to do some very cool things with RSS, podcasting, photos and video all delivered through SplashCast. We are armed with new EVDO connections and Twitter accounts. We even created a special RSS feed for the coverage: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SxswBySplashcast Here’s our first post kicking off coverage. Thanks to Scott Beale, one of the first people to post the player publicly.

We (ok, I) talk a big game, so hopefully we’ll be able to live up to it! I’m addicted to blogging first on news and Alex is a great interviewer – so it should be fun. If you’re down there too, don’t be shy.

We’ll see how it goes, I’m at http://twitter.com/marshallk I’m going to have to figure out the best way to deal with the SMS options. I’m used to getting piles of SMS alerts from RSS monitoring services, but this is ridiculous!

My co-worker Alex Williams and I have rented a 3 bedroom house in Austin from the 8th through the 15th. If you are interested in sharing these comfortable digs with us, a short bus ride from the event and coming in at $100/night, drop me a line. marshall@ marshallk.com

Digg just announced the addition of two new topics on the site – one about a boring software company I don’t follow and the other, the US 2008 Presidential Election. It’s going to get heated in there – people assume that Digg has a liberal bias but conservatives are very comfortable going there as well. Michelle Malkin, besides making one of the most well produced video blogs on the web, has encouraged people to go there in droves, if I remember the story correctly. (Here’s the discussion of the announcement.)

Anyway, what better time than now to post here a wonderful SplashCast creation – one embedded media player that contains all the candiates’ offical YouTube videos and updates automatically as it’s populated by RSS feeds. Woo hoo! I’m going to be working on promoting this one and many other related channels to relevant bloggers in the coming weeks. I don’t even like any of the candidates – not at all, I just think this is a very cool use of SplashCast. So let’s celebrate Digg’s insane move into thumbs-up, thumbs-down partisan politics on a large scale with a player right here and now.

Having run out of dour topics to post about here 🙂 I thought I’d share a quick link that I think people will appreciate. Are you wondering just what’s going on with the Belgian papers suing to get out of Google News? Danny Sulivan has written an excellant post about it, complete with an interview from one of the Belgian parties. It’s here.

The shortest version of the story here is that Danny suspects that the Belgian papers don’t really want out of Google, they just want Google to pay them before indexing their content. That’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. Very interesting story though, in its details.