New of the Day - August 27 2008

Today's Top News From Mahalo.com
2008 Democratic Convention: DNC Schedule | Hillary Clinton Speech | Janet Napolitano | Mark Warner | Sisterhood of Traveling Pantsuits | Brian Schweitzer
Russell Crowe to play Bill Hicks in biopic
Samantha Ronson tell-all book planned
Amber Pennell rescued, survived 5 days down 80-foot ravine
Mayra Lizbeth Rosales: Too fat to kill?
Sudan plane hijacking: 2 hijackers surrender
Model agency founder Gerard Ford dead at 83
Huge immigration raid in Mississippi, 600 detained
30,000 protest in Bangkok against ruling government
Arthur Miller, teacher accused of fondling female students, dead in possible suicide
Hurricane Gustav's projected path
Dr. Dre's son, Andre Young Jr., found dead over the weekend
Featured Videos: Orangina Animal Ad | Crazed Weather Guy Fan | McCain Jay Leno | Kanye West Good Morning | Heidi Montag Overdosin | Michelle Obama Speech | Ted Kennedy Speech
Top searches August 27: Hurricane Gustav | Cassandra Jade Estevez | Democratic Convention Schedule | Dancing with the Stars | Dancing With The Stars New Cast | HCG Diet | Lacey Schwimmer...
This week's How To Articles:
How to Write a Lesson Plan
How to Make Your Own Dog Food
How to Make a Lemon Drop
How to Make a Lemon Drop Martini
How to Make Alfredo Sauce
How to Give a Massage in 15 Minutes
How to Overcome a Fear of Flying
How to Stop Foreclosure
How to Choose Pumpkin Variety
How to Make Peanut Butter
How to Get Rid of Moles
How to Bet on Horse Racing
How to Make a Tom Collins
How to Make Apple Cider
How to Buy Hamsters
How to Take Care of a Hamster
How to Make Buttercream Icing
How to Make Toffee
How to Write a Thank You Letter
How to Get Rid of Cellulite
How to Eat Healthy Snacks
How to Make Cheese
How to Lower Your Cholesterol

A blog post regarding the fact that I'm still retired from blogging

Couple of quick updates since folks seem a little confused about my where I went and why.

I've retired from blogging as per the previous post titled "Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging" on July 11th. It's been five weeks and I don't plan on coming back to blogging. I've had a wonderful time writing my personal emails to a smaller audience of 4,000 dedicated subscribers. If you would like to join the mailing list you can do so here: Jason's List. I've been writing 2-5k word thought pieces on the email list, and I've found it to be very rewarding in a way that the mud pit of blogging isn't.

Now I still love blogs: still read them, still comment on them.... but I'm trying to find my voice again--my true voice. There is something about the acoustic, intimate nature of email that is impacting how I write. I'm writing every sentence as if I'm looking someone in the eye and speaking directly to them. I'm thinking about the economy of words again. I'm trying to say things in as few words as possible, and I'm cutting sentences, paragraphs and pages more than I'm publishing them. I'm proof reading again, and C.K. Sample is proofing for me. It's a new, slower and more considered process and I'm loving it. I've published ten emails or so and I've thrown away at least 30. Somethings happening, but I don't know what it is.

Over 100 folks respond to every email and I try to respond to every single person. Some of these emails are five pages and I read every single word. No one else sees these words--they are between me and the reader and that is also wonderful and true. Posting to the comment section of a blog is meaningless when compared to sending an email containing your thoughts inteneded for the author. Folks say very, very deep, true and honest things in one to one communications that they can't say in a blog comment. I love that.

Some folks believe that I'm wasting the discourse and that it should be open to the public, but opening it to the public would bleach it. So, thanks for reading and I'll see you in your email box.... or not.

Couple of quick links:
  1. I'm working on the TechCrunch50 conference taking place on September 8-10th in San Francisco (it's like the old DEMO conference without the $20k presenting fee). I'm partners with Mike Arrington on this event, where fifty brand new companies will launch. If you're part of the Jason Nation you need to be at the event, and we can work out the details of you getting there--just email me if you're having a hard time with it (if you can afford the fee just pay it--the conference needs the support. If you can't ping JCAL).
  2. The New York Times covered the TechCrunch50 conference today, and Arrington responded with his wonder "Pouring our Heart Into TechCrunch50" post which sums up how the entire team feels about the event.
  3. I'm hard at work on Mahalo.com and we're on track for a record month again in August--the slowest month of the year. That feels great.
  4. I'm thinking of turning this blog into a linkblog... like my own personal delicious. Thoughts?

Also, you can add me on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Delicious, Pownce
Jason Calacanis on tumblr, mixx, Flickr

Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging.

NOTE: Yes I've stopped blogging, but you can find my commentary/blog posts on my private mailing list now, Jason's List, here:
https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/jason

(Note: use your real name and a real email address. I only approve folks with real names).



"It's with a heavy heart, and much consideration, that today I would like to announce my retirement from blogging."
Jason McCabe Calacanis, July 11th 2008.


This was an extremely difficult decision, and I haven't made it lightly. After five years I'm not sure I know any other way of being but the blog, but at some point you have to hang it up. I know that I had made the right decision for me and my family. I am very proud of the success that we have had in blogging and I leave the game with few regrets.

To be sure, I am going to miss blogging. I am going to miss the relationships with my fellow bloggers. I am going to miss the readers. I am going to miss the great friends that I have made over this time. I am going to miss all the good times that we have had together. But most of all, I am going to miss the comments.*

Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been linked to from so many blogs over the five years, and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.**

Calacanis PR rep: At this point Mr. Calacanis will take a couple of questions (you can post to the comment if you like).


"What now?" Saul Hansell, New York Times:

Starting today all of my thoughts will be reserved for a new medium. Something smaller, something more intimate, and something very personal: an email list. Today the email list has about 600 members, I'm going to cut it off when it reaches 750. Frankly, that's enough more than enough people to have a conversation with. I'm going to try and build a deeper relationship with fewer people--try to get back to my roots.

"Why now?" Allen Stern, Center Networks.

That's complicated as they say on Facebook. Let's me try and explain my thinking.

First, please don't take this as a condemnation of blogging. I love blogs and always will. However, I've done my part and I'm looking to strip it down. I'm looking for something more acoustic, something more authentic and something more private. Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it.

The "a-list" pressure, the TechMeme leaderboard debates, and constant accusations of link-baiting are now too much of a distraction. I've never link-baited in my entire career--I just spoke from the heart for better or worse. If people want to say honesty is link-baiting fine--that's on them, not me. If they want to turn link-baiting into a science and dissect every detail of my posts in order to reverse engineering that's fine, but it wont work. Link-baiting doesn't exist to me, so trying to figure out how it's done is a fool's errand.

Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it's simply not worth it. I'd rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation.

"Will you come out of retirement at some point?" Clark Kent, Daily Planet

No. Absolutely not. This is not a Michael Jordan or Jay-Z ploy. I'm done. It's not over one instance, and it's not because--give me a minute [editor's note: Calacanis looked down, fighting back his emotions]--I can't handle the pressures of being an A-list blogger. This is a very personal choice that I've discussed with my family, and it's the direction we want to go. I've done blogging and now it's time for the next chapter.

"If you would change anything over your career would you?" Brian Williams, NBC

Not that I can think of. Well, maybe I wouldn't have published that story on YouTube not being a real business, or maybe I wouldn't have wasted the energy on destroying PayPerPost... but you know, that's all hindsight and I live in the moment for better or worse. I never said I was perfect [audience laughs]... you did.

[Williams: an even bigger laugh from the audience. Cameras flash, Calacanis hugs some associates including Brian Alvey, Peter Rojas, Mark Cuban, and Jon Miller before leaving the stage--his face in his hand to cover the tears. I can say personally I've experienced few things this emotional in 35 years of broadcasting.].

Calacanis PR rep: Thank you folks, that's all we have time for. We would like to ask you to respect the privacy of Jason and his family, especially his bulldogs Taurus and Fondue who are very young and not used to this level of media attention. Mr. Calacanis would like to have some private time and this moment. We will be providing transcripts and photos following this event.





* Special thanks to Dan Marino for the inspiration.
** Special thanks to Lou Gehrig for the inspiration.

Mahalo Guide Notes in Yahoo/Google results (beta)

We've given users the option of putting Mahalo's top 7 results on their Google or Yahoo pages, as well as our approved by Mahalo icons (the flower), for a while now. Today we've enabled users to put our Guide Note on their Google results.

This is really a nice experience I think. Thoughts?

You can try this in Mahalo Share



In Tools--Add Ons--Preferences you can set these three features up.

Twitter's milkshake meet FriendFeed's straw

For the past two weeks or so I've focused the majority of my "short messaging/blogging" from Twitter to a new service called FriendFeed. FriendFeed is very similar in relation to twitter in that both systems are designed to help you share quick messages.

It's become clear to me over these two weeks that the incumbent Twitter is in very serious risk of having their milkshake drunk by shinny new FriendFeed. I've got about 1/3rd of my Twitter audience on FriendFeed already, others have half.

Now, most folks will say that the switch is because Twitter has been almost unusable for the past couple of weeks, either because the service is completely down, or even worse partially down. I say even worse because being able to broadcast on Twitter but not see replies back is just disastrous. You put information out into the world and then don't know what happens from there. Twitter has fixed this problem since, but as any Twitter user can tell you, when you need Twitter work you frequently are faced with the fail whale.

Twitter's down time is a superficial issue when it comes to the competition from FriendFeed. Everyone's been dealing with the downtime, and sure the downtime will get people to dip their toe into the FriendFeed pond, but the reason folks are going to stay in FriendFeed's pond, and perhaps forget about Twitter is the features.

Now, FriendFeed has been flawless since inception in terms of downtime and that's great. However, Twitter doesn't have some major, and basic, features that FriedFeed does have. The most important are:
  1. Easy to read replies
  2. Replies that can be any length
  3. Search
  4. The ability to post media--photos and videos--to your feed
Twitter needs to not only get their act together in terms of up time, they have to get some features out the door. If Twitter can't get #1, 2, and 4 together they are really going to lose their business.

The comment systems is so fast and easy that it's perfect. So perfect that folks use it. The more they use it, the more you will not want to leave FriendFeed. (see image on the right).

Photos and videos are key for any service, and the fact that Twitter doesn't have them is just really a problem. If I have a YouTube video I want to share with my friends am I going to post it to twitter where it will get no replies, or am I going to post it to FF where I'll get a dozen? Fairly easy choice, same thing with photos (see image on the right).

Twitter can, of course, come back from this. They're just in the horrible position of not only having to get stable, but to release a bunch of intense, memory hungry features. I don't envy them.

What does Twitter need to do to save their milkshake?
  1. Get stable (duh)
  2. Get ajax-style replies to work--now. This is critical
  3. Show images and videos in tweet stream (when linked to)
  4. Increase the size of replies (and forget about SMS as much).
Please answer the following on your blog:
  1. What do you think Twitter should do to fight off FriendFeed? Can they?
  2. Is it too late for Twitter to fend off FF?
  3. What can we learn from FriendFeed's drinking of Twitter's milkshake?
  4. Does Twitter have any advantage over FF at this point?
  5. What are the killer features on FF in your mind?

My links:

http://friendfeed.com/jasoncalacanis
http://www.twitter.com/jasoncalacanis

The (evil?) genius of Nick Denton

Interesting post on RADAR online about Nick Denton cutting pay rates for Gawker Media bloggers. I posted a comment which I'll share below.


Hey Choire,

Some notes on your story from one of Nick's top three Frienemies.

1. Despite this change in pay Gawker is very, very competitive in terms of not only blogging jobs, but MSM jobs. Most full-time folks at Gawker are probably making 3-5k a month/36-60k a year, and some are in the 60-100k range. That's a very BIG number for folks working from home in the journalism/editorial space, many of whom are just out of school. Most folks make 20-35k out of school. Not telling you anything you don't know obviously. It makes sense that the rate will rise and fall with Gawker's RPM.

2. The five bucks for every 1,000 permalink page views (i.e. NOT the homepage, which is 50-70% of the traffic) is probably the break even point for Denton/Gawker (i.e. their RPM). So, there is no downside to giving 100% of that money away to his bloggers because it only drives more folks to the homepage/builds the brands. Denton is very, very smart in this regard.

3. Forcing folks into this model has lowered the "human capital" costs at Gawker dramatically. Nick doesn't have to fire folks, they fire themselves. Nick doesn't have to give people raises, they give them to themselves. This is a very significant savings for Nick. How many full-time editorial managers are there at Gawker? Are there any since Lock left?! What's the ratio, one manager for every 50 bloggers?

4. Gawker has eliminated the need for marketing based on this model. The marketing is now built into each editor's cognitive process. Again, genius.

5. Denton has less stress in his life. That's the main point of this. Denton doesn't like to talk much as we both know, and the last people he wants to talk to are the folks working for him. If he must talk to those folks that last thing he wants to talk about is their pay. So, if you look at Gawker as the ultimate life-style business Denton has achieved his goal: money, power, status, and no management overhead. Genius.

6. The downside? Insane amounts of inlinking in posts (one Valleywag post I just looked at had a half dozen links to earlier stories is a big one. Abuse of the "after the jump" device to the point of absurdity, and finally the selection of stories based on their diggability and SEO ability. Denton doesn't care about this obviously... it's a network built on gossip, personal attacks, and porn. Why would gaming the system matter more than those things?

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

best jason

Used/antique phone booths

I'm looking to get a couple of used/refurbished/antique phone booths for Mahalo so folks who need to take a call can jump in them.... and because they look cool.

If you know anyone selling them let me know at jason @ calacanis dot com.

User participation increases when you don't have to login.

Shocking.

I guess that's why Wikipedia let people edit pages without being logged for so long. :-)

New Mahalo features: anyone can edit (even if not logged in) and anyone can create a new page (easily)

Two very important features were launched on Mahalo today:
  1. Anyone can edit any page on Mahalo even if they are not logged in. This means if you don't feel like logging in, but you want to add a fast fact to a page, or correct an error, you can do so quickly and easily. Of course, we check ever edit made in the system to make sure it is correct (i.e. Mahalo is Wikipedia with paid Fact Checkers).

  2. Anyone can easily create a new page in Mahalo. If you see a red link on a Mahalo page that means we need to have that page build. So, in the example below you can click on the "War Games" link on the Mathew Broderick page and start building it out.
This is a major step for Mahalo. We started as a very closed system while we perfected our page design. Then we opened up to registered users making changes and did that for six months. Since that has gone so well we're opening up the site to unregistered users (who are tracked by their IP address, just like Wikipedia does).

Let me know if you have any questions.

Google's "this site may harm your computer" warning

Has anyone seen this before?



This is the first time I've seen a safe search warning. From Google:

  • "We want our users to feel safe when they search the web, and we're continuously working to identify dangerous sites and increase protection for our users. This warning message appears with search results we've identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer."
Here are the follow up messages... wow, this is very cool. Right?

Who did Wall-E rip off more, Idiocracy or Short Circuit?

I really loved Wall-E, but I couldn't help but notice that more than half of the film's plot was lifted from the brilliant--and much more adult--film idiocracy. Additionally, the robot seems so cute and familiar that you have to wonder--as many people have--if you've met him before (hint, you have).

Your comments are appreciate. Oh yeah... this is on digg--please digg it up!



Short Circuit: Treads, binocular eyes, clamps as hands.
Wall-E: Treads, binocular eyes, clamps as hands.



Short Circuit: sad eyes.
Wall-E: say eyes.





Idiocracy: Fat people, drinking fake food, in front of multi-touch video displays. Oh yeah, they've forgotten how to read.
Wall-E: Fat people, drinking fake food, in front of multi-touch video displays. Oh yeah, they've forgotten how to read. (anyone have better photo of fat people in chairs from Wall-E?)




Idiocracy: distopian future caused by consumerism; huge piles of trash litter the skyline
Wall-E: distopian future caused by consumerism; huge piles of trash litter the skyline





Idiocracy: Absurdly large Costco
Wal-E: Absurdly large Buy 'n Large (need photo)

What other similarities have you found? Please post in comments.

Next Page >

Toro, a bulldog

Hello. My name is Jason.
I'm the CEO of Mahalo.com, a human powered search engine. I was previously the co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey, and the GM of Netscape.

I'm currently on the board of social shopping site ThisNext. You might remember me from my days as editor and CEO of the Silicon Alley Reporter magazine.

Mike Arrington and I partnered on the TechCrunch40 event in September. We're going to do it again next year.

This is my blog, this is where I live. You should also listen to my podcast.


Add me on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Delicious, Pownce
Jason Calacanis on tumblr, mixx, Flickr





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