A quick thank you to Mike Manuel, Jeremy Pepper and Giovanni Rodriguez for organizing last night’s Third Thursday PR meet-up. Special guest Mike Arrington of TechCrunch braved an audience of 60 PRs and gave us a good insight into the way he works, what he’s looking for, how to contact him, general trends and why consumer-facing Internet start-ups should have a blog. He also told us about his fave start-ups, well mainly Riya.

A few take-aways – Mike spends 15 hours a day working on TechCrunch, he’s honesty and obviously interested in Web 2.0 companies, he’ll honor an embargo (and ideally would like 72 hours notice), he prefers embargoes to end at 9.00am PT rather than 8.00am ET but has been known to stay up to post at that time, he thinks press releases are the bane of his life (gets 50 a day), and he now sees his ‘competition’ as BusinessWeek and Wired rather than other blogs.

Great to see Matthew Podboy and the team from Voce there too.

The next Third Thursday is planned to be in San Francisco – you can sign up here.

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