Let's talk about TC for a minute: 1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques. 2) one backlink from them doesn't

Let's talk about TC for a minute: 1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques. 2) one backlink from them doesn't appear to be worth crap any more in Google. Google (as far as I can tell) looks much more at the heterogeneity of your linkbase than it does any individual link from a high PR site (maybe Wikipedia's excluded here, but I don't know). Patrick and Peldi's advice to target 40 smaller blogs with personalized pitches (there's that interesting content thing again - interesting to an audience of one each time) is probably better than TechCrunch traffic in every single way you slice it.