Yahoo made a huge critical blunder today: they decided to compete with their customers. Today they launched a content site called Shine dedicated to women. It looks really slick, and they make a point of talking about all the great editors they have working on it from Jane and the Wall Street Journal.

Ummm….. hello!?!?!? isn’t Yahoo’s business to PARTNER with sites like Jane and the WSJ? Isn’t the point of the Yahoo Publisher Network to support and grow publishers and newspapers!??! What next a consumer electronics site to compete with Engadget and Gizmodo, or a sports site to compete with ESPN and Sportsline? A gossip site to compete with PerezHIlton and Gawker?

Folks at Google make a point of letting partners know they will NEVER move into the content space and compete with them. They understand that the partnership with content creators is greater than taking the business away from them. That’s why publisher are so upset with Google for even considering launching KNOL. If I were Google I would NOT launch Knol… it’s going to really jeopardize Google’s relationships with publishers.

Anyway, back to Shine: wow, really dumb idea on Yahoo part. I would kill myself if I was running the publisher network right now. Can you imagine what it would be like to go to WSJ, Jane, iVillage, Glam, or Sugar publishing and try and get them to support Yahoo services?

• Yahoo sale person: “Hello, I from Yahoo. We would like you to use Yahoo Publisher Network and share ad revenue with you”
• Glam/Sugar/Jane/publisher “oh, really? That’s great! I hope you take the profits and put them into your competing content site that will drink our milkshake!”
• Yahoo sale person: ” You bet! We will drink it up…. we will drink your milkshake.”

When Microsoft takes over Yahoo this will create even more problems. MSN/Live is trying to compete with Google AdSense and Yahoo’s blunder is going to feed right into Google’s “we won’t compete with publishers” position.

If I was running a women’s site today I would make a point of puling everything I have off of Yahoo and building a voting block of women’s sites to do the same. If Yahoo wants to go “winner take all” that’s their right, but the niche content sites should stand up for themselves and vote with their partnership dollars for a true partner who doesn’t run off with your business in the night.

Maybe this is Yahoo’s plan to save itself? Maybe if the launch media properties and kill off search and the adnetwork they can convince folks they are Newscorp 2.0?

Someone please explain to me why they would do something so dumb right now. Rafat Ali? Kara Swisher? Mike Arrington? Om Malik? Henry Blodget? Someone please clue me in… because this seems so dumb I can’t understand it.

We’ve been live-blogging March Madness over at Mahalo for the past two weeks and we’re putting together a Final Four Predictions page.

Many more NCAA Tournament Brackets and links after the jump. Great job sports team!

Now you can watch Jason Nation on my Facebook Profile. Just go to the Jason Calacanis Facebook profile.

As a followup to our Best Evil Robots page from the other day in our “best of” category, we’ve done a “best fictional brands” page on Mahalo. Do feel free to share it on digg, delicious, or your blog.

here are my two favorites: Brawndo and the Bluth company.

I get the sense this is the start of something…

On today’s Mahalo Daily they interview eBay guru Greg Kusch who shares his eBay Selling Tips.Mahalo also has some great tips including How to Sell on eBay for Beginners and How to Shop on eBay.

Also, you should create a YouTube account and subscribe to Mahalo Daily.

You gotta love Dave Winer…. it never ends!

Uhh… Dave, I’ve spoken at conference for over a decade in front of tens of thousands of people. One time someone heckled me from the audience: you. I’ve attended thousands of events with hundreds of thousands of people and i’ve only heard one person heckle someone: you.

At a certain point you’re going to have to admit that it *might* not be the rest of the world–it might be you.

If anyone out there is a great howto writer I suggest visiting the Mahalo Greenhouse, which is now accepting freelancer write applications for the dozens of howto articles we need to write.

Back to my random thoughts post…

1. Michael Arrington and I will be announcing the TechCrunch event details later today. We’ve got some big news. It’s going to be amazing… I’m so proud of the work we’re doing getting startup companies a massive push. If you look at www.techcrunch40.com you’ll see so many companies that have done so well in the past seven months. Heather Harde, Mike’s partner in crime, has done amazing job locking down our partnerships with AMAZING companies including TKTKTKT, TKTKT, and TTKKTKTK (can’t tell your right now). I’m really excited that many of last years partners are coming back to help make this year 10x better. We are demanding a lot from our partners in terms of participation in the event, from helping the startup companies, to being at the event, to helping us find companies to present…. everything.
2. The second part of my interview with The Deal is out… it’s got a linkbaiting headline as Beet.TV points out, but in fact I think it’s an important interview. I’m trying to let folks a little deeper into my thinking with my Jason Nation USTREAM channel and doing video podcasts. It’s easy to be misunderstood in a blog post or joking twitter. In video? It tends to go better.

3. You can save 15% at Mashable on the SMX Social Media Marketing conference in Long Beach on April 22-23rd. I will be speaking on a panel with Jimmy Wales. That should be interesting, so much has happened since our last dance (video from audience) at the DLD conference. Here’s a YouTube interview from DLD I did.

4. There is a very important piece by the very smart Seth Finkelstein in the The Guardian about Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales titled “Wikipedia school for scandal has plenty more secrets to reveal.” Jimbo calls Seth a “troll,” the rest of us think Seth is brilliant. Go figure.
5. People are still talking about the “Are ad networks for weak publishers” post I did last week (Silicon Alley Insider republished it, and got good comments). To be clear, I said in the piece that folks with under $250,000 in revenue are fine to work with adnetworks, and that everyone should used text link ads from Google Adsense since they are so targeted. Now, we can argue the number (some folks say it should be $500,000, which I can understand), but the fact is at some point you’re throwing money away. Now, Federated Media or other niche ad networks are sort of side issue. I understand there are some niche sites that just don’t want to make the jump into being a “real” business/publishing house (think: boingboing). Totally get that. Rock on!
6. This week I showed the power of QIK when I had 50+ folks vote for a digg. It was fun… folks blogged about it, lots of folks blogged it. Some Stumbled it. We still didn’t make the digg homepage.
7. Our “Best Evil Robots” page on Mahalo got a lot of feedback.
8. The JasonNation and Pirillosters are fighting it out on USTREAM. Photo evidence of puppy wars!
   
9. Twitter is the big Mahalo back channel fyi. If you see a problem (like this guy) or want a page made just include the word Mahalo.com and/or @MahaloToDo. Mahalo is like the wikipedia–just with real names, and we pay folks.
10. Pirillo is trying to get a large scale open source CMS project based on Drupal–watch the video of Chris explaining the project.
11. CrowdFusion gets a mention.
12. Sometimes I just sit around and watch the ThisNext Shopping map.
    
    
13. PaidContent has hired a CEO. Way to go Rafat… you need to focus on the editorial where you’re passion is best put to use.

The How To team at Mahalo is really on fire… their latest set of financial howto articles are amazing. this one on “how to file your taxes” is epic. Plus, it’s just the start… we plan on evolving these howto articles over the next couple of years.

If you have any howto article you want created just twitter the title and @MahaloToDo. We should be able to turn it around in a day or two. or just email jason at mahalo.com with the subject HowToToDo.

I’m really excited about the freelancers joining the howto group as well. You can now see howto articles we have up for grabs in the Mahalo Greenhouse.

Here are the rest of the financial ones: