San Francisco  - One of the top technology pundits in the blogosphere said Thursday that he planned to take a break after receiving a death threat and being spat at during a tech conference.

Michael Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog is one of the most influential forums in the technology world, announced his decision in a blog posting from a conference in Munich.

"Someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face," Arrington wrote. "Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd."

"I draw the line at being spat on. It's one step away from something far more violent," he said.

The incident followed a death threat that Arrington said, he and his family had received last summer. "Seeing my parents fear for their lives and not understand how or why their son was in this position changed me, made me a much less forgiving person in general."

The incident sparked a lively debate about an increasing level of vitriol in technology blogs and web forums. Jason Calacanis, another influential blogger and founder of the Web media site Mahalo said in a posting that the incident and death threat signaled that venomous online attacks were being transferred to real life.

"Do you think there is a trend with the hate and aggressiveness of the blogosphere seeping into real life?" he asked.

Arrington speculated that the spitter may have been a tech entrepreneur angered that the site refused to write about his start- up company. "In the past I've been grabbed, pulled, shoved and otherwise abused at events, but never spat on," he wrote.

Arrington said that he would stop work after covering the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to "get a better perspective on what I'm spending my life doing ... while sitting on a beach somewhere far away from my iPhone and laptop." (dpa)