MediaFile

From the TechCrunch conference in San Francisco, this post is brought to you by Alexei Oreskovic and Sarah McBride:

Michael Arrington, one of the most high-profile figures in the world of tech blogging, has lost the TechCrunch soapbox he built. But he’s found a new way to get his point across: T-shirts

Arrington took the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Monday, moments after parent-company AOL announced that he was no longer part of the company due to his new role heading up a $20 million venture capital fund.

“It’s no longer a good situation for me to stay at TechCrunch,” Arrington said, calling it a sad moment for him and promising to get the controversy out of the way at the start, to avoid distracting from the 3-day conference in San Francisco.

True to form, the pugnacious Arrington unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a t-shirt with the words “unpaid blogger” printed in large letters, a jab at AOL/Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, who had insisted that Arrington was no longer an AOL employee after news of his VC fund surfaced.

AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong has reportedly approached private equity firms to gauge interest in a deal with Yahoo that would place Armstrong as the head of the combined company, according to a Bloomberg report.

CNBC later reported that a source close to Yahoo said the company had no interest in a deal with AOL.

AOL shares closed down 5.3 percent at $14.72 while Yahoo inched up 0.3 pct to $14.48.

******We sprinkled updates into this blog. We’re highlighting them like this.******Thanks to TechCrunch, U.S. tech reporters are about to spend another weekend working instead of playing. UPDATE: Or maybe Kara Swisher at All Things D will save them!******Two sources told proprietor Michael Arrington that Google “is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter.” He wrote:***

We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

***

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

***

Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game.

TechCrunch publisher and lead writer Michael Arrington got a jump on other April Fool’s pranksters with a Monday, March 31 post entitled “Why We’re Suing Facebook for $25 million in Statutory Damages”

But Arrington gave away the punchline at a news conference at Facebook offices in mid-March, when he surprised other reporters by volunteering how he and his lawyer had thought of suing Facebook for violations to Arrington’s privacy. It was all a big joke, Arrington, formerly a Sillicon Valley lawyer, said at the time.

His Monday post says TechCrunch is filing a lawsuit against Facebook on April 1 seeking $25 million in damages, along with a related civil case for assault and battery and infliction of emotional distress.