At last, I understand the vision of synergy between News Corp. and Dow Jones. It's all about Kara Swisher, basically. The abrasive, pint-sized reporter-turned blogger spent dinner at Web 2.0 Summit locked in conversation with gregarious, pint-sized megamogul Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.'s CEO, and, come December, Swisher's boss. Swisher, of course, has been blogging hot and heavy on AllThingsD about Facebook, MySpace's chief rival. She's just the starting point. News Corp. is so vast that next year, it could easily assign an army of Wall Street Journal reporters just to cover itself. Check out the photos for Swisher's encounter with Murdoch, and more.

Tonight: LeWeb3 host and blogueur Loic Le Meur and blogger-cartoonist Hugh MacLoud host a dinner at Foreign Cinema in San Francisco's Mission District. Warning: The event may already be overbooked. [Eventbrite]

More than one person has described TechCrunch's Michael Arrington to me as "touchy." Which is putting it mildly. Try "hypersensitive." Or "thin-skinned." Or "prickly." The latest example? Arrington recently posted about the naming of three people to the advisory panel of TechCrunch20, his upcoming startup conference: French blogger Loic Le Meur, angel investor Ron Conway, and Sarah Lacy. The panelists, unexpectedly, proved controversial — and Arrington, predictably, overreacted.Commenters on TechCrunch started attacking Le Meur's politics and the conflict of interest faced by Conway, who might find himself judging startups that compete with companies in his portfolio. (No one, as far as we know, wrote anything bad about Lacy, so we will: Why on earth is the savvy former BusinessWeek reporter subjecting herself to Arrington's caprices?) Arrington first started deleting the critical comments — and then yanked the post itself. Chalk it up as another example of the startup critic who can dish it out, but can't take it.