By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

I’ve sat on the fence all day surrounding the TechCrunch writer DB taking gifts to write posts on companies.

I don’t have much to add to this fray beyond being a spectator of a problem that I would not want to have to deal with here at Tech Startups.

This event, lawsuits and jumbled messes like the CrunchPad are putting some serious doubts into TechCrunch’s ability to maintain as a tech reporting powerhouse.

The worst of it though is something that TechCrunch has tried to slide under the carpet – all of DB’s posts. They removed them from the site. Everyone thought that there would be no way to go back and check which company may have used payolla in the form of gear to get their story posted on TechCrunch.

However, all around awesome dude and internets master Kosso, with the help of Google cache (see his comment) was able to reconstruct a partial list:

Appsfire. PanelFly. MacStories. Palaran. WooThemes. Skribit. Ning. Isorocket. DropBox. TextPlus. Graphic.ly. Posterous. Personera. Rocketbox. LinkedIn. Owle. Yazzem. Apple. Square. BeamMe. Vokle. CubeTree. TwitVid. TokBox. EtherPad. Yammer. Seesmic.

I am not sure how TechCrunch will avoid releasing the company name that did pay to have their post(s) written. It certainly is in bad form not to share this. By not sharing which company it was it casts doubt on all of the TechCrunch posts legitimacy. All of them.