Jessica Guynn at SFGate reports that Natali Del Conte has left Mike Arrington’s blog TechCrunch, at least partly due to sexist and annoying comments on her blog posts. (Also, she’d gotten a new job and hoped to keep blogging at TechCrunch from her new job, but Arrington wanted her undivided attention.) But also, Guynn writes:

The diplomatic Del Conte says she got more than she bargained for at TechCrunch, both in learning about Web 2.0 from Arrington and in the crude, rude or just generally sexist remarks from some in the TechCrunch community.

“She’s never had that kind of direct, anonymous feedback, and it’s clear it got to her to some extent. I’m very sorry for that,” Arrington said

I was curious, so I looked up one of Arrington’s recent own blog posts about a DVD swapping service, which had 19 comments. Here’s a sampling:

“Barter does work in certain areas. In the Uk there is something called Barter card and its a B2b service.”

“These people need to take an Econs 101 course and learn the foolishness of replacing a solution (money) with a problem (barter).”

“Michael, there is a factual error in your article.”

“Michael – I think you are dead right.”

OK, so that sounds like “direct, anonymous feedback,” sure enough. And then I looked up comments on one of Del Conte’s recent posts, about a streaming music video site, and they weren’t quite as helpful, let’s say. Looking back, it seems as though the comments were about half relevant to her blog posts and about half personal attacks on her for being “cute” but not smart. Even some of her supporters say idiotic things like, “She is a smart girl. Just give her some time.” Blurgh!

It just gets back to the idea (courtesy of the New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus) that women simply don’t write about “hard” subjects like science and technology, because we’re just too focused on being cute and writing about daisies. Or something.