The story behind the suspension of TechCrunch UK and the termination of Sethi is long, somewhat complicated, and an absolute shame that it aired out publicly, however, I will try to sum it up for you as best I can.

TechCrunch is some type partner to the Six Apart event Le Web 3 being held in Paris. Sethi wrote a post on TechCrunch UK that was fairly critical of the Le Web 3. Event organizer, Loic Le Meur, got ticked off about the post and wrote a comment on the post calling Sethi an “asshole”.

Arrington wrote an email to Le Meur stating that he didn’t have a problem with the post put up by Sethi, however, would see about having his comment removed if he wished. Le Meur said yes and apologized for the comment publicly in the post.

Arrington says that he asked, not ordered Sethi to remove Le Meur’s comment, but Sethi instead left the comment in and wrote a second post, which also has been removed, further highlighting the fact that Le Meur called him an “asshole” for his original post, after he made a public apology for the comment.

Even this, according to Arrington weren’t grounds for firing Sethi as editor of TechCrunch UK, however, when Sethi left this comment on his second post stating, “that TechCrunch UK will be doing a series of seminars and a conference next year as well as a series of smaller meetings in conjunction with friends & partners which have been in the planning for sometime now”, this was the last straw.

Arrington felt that Sethi was promoting a competing event while trashing another which is a conflict of interest since TechCrunch is a partner of Le Web is unethical. Arrington states that “Basic ethical behavior is not subjective. We will not associate with individuals who choose to cross the line.”

Believe it or not, this is the short version of what went down. There is a lot more on CrunchNotes and the comments are still flowing.

The blog currently has a Page Rank of 7, earns about $2000 per month, and is just shy of one million page views a month. The blog also has over 150,00 pages indexed on MSN and Yahoo and over 60,000 pages indexed on Google.

I am assuming that topic of the blog may not be the easiest topic to monetize because $2000 a month just doesn’t seem like a lot for a blog with almost a million page views a month. Jeremy does state, however, that the blog could easily be pushed to the $6000 a month range with the right blog manager.

Dude, I am new to blogging but I have been dealing with people for a long time. Trust me, even if some of the blogs that b5 has accepted into the network are the most boring blogs on the Internet and you shutter at the thought of reading them, you cannot say that they are boring in public. As an owner of b5media, the content that you put forward via your network is your content. It doesn’t matter if you think that content is boring or not. At the very least you need to be indifferent to it or defer to someone else on your management team who loves it. Anything less makes you sound like your are in it just for the money.

Omar Al-Hajjar from webbymedia wrote a 5 step process on How to Start a Blog Network. Because it is late and I am too tired to come up with my own list I have decided to just comment on Omar’s list.

My comments won’t make much sense unless you read Omar’s post first.

1. Branding is the “in” thing to do these days. You may sacrifice a bit of Google juice in the early goings, however, 9rules or b5media just sound better than kitchenapplicanblognetwork.

2. Like DreamHost or BlueHost…

3. Note to Self: Ask Omar who can create a good template for $250 bucks.

4. You can hardly call your collection of blogs a network if you don’t have a gadget blog member.

5. This is the only item that I don’t totally agree with. Not to say that you cannot be successful flipping blogs or blog networks, most generally will not be. Unless you are just lucky, it takes many months of good writing before a blog is popular enough to sell for a profit. If you are only blogging or creating a blog network with the hope that someone will buy it, chances are you will become boredwith it before you have near enough quality content for the network to be worth anything.

About a month or so ago, BlogNetworkWatch.com was bought by Blog Media Inc. and relaunched. Around the same time they bought BlogNetWorkList and have recently launched the 2.0 version. What Blog Media Inc. is doing here is very cool because they have automated the BlogNetworkList ranking order by scriptomatically grabbing information from various sources such Technorati, Google, Yahoo, and Alexa.

There is more than one way to skin a cat and BlogNetworkList gives you more than one way rank a blog network. You can sort based on various factors such as number of member blogs, number of backlinks, average Technorati’s ranking, and more.

Well done guys…

We are not sure of when the new iFroggy homepage will be unveiled but we let you know as soon as we find out anything more.