Let's talk about TC for a minute:<p>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).<p>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 <i>every single way you slice it</i>.