Google Knol + Google
We’re testing putting some of our Mahalo content on Google Knol… thoughts?
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 2
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 3
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 4
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 5
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 6
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 7
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Walkthrough Part 8
How to Bleach Hair
How to Read Music
How to Cut Household Expenses
How to Make Lemonade
How to Make Chocolate Chip Cookies
How to Write a Resignation Letter
How to Read Food Labels
How to Make Curry Powder
How to Go Green In Your Kitchen
How to Get Rid of Ants
How to Understand Your Kids’ Text Messages
How to Grill Salmon
How to Get Better Gas Mileage
How to Speak French
How To Play Piano For Beginners
How To Train For Your First Marathon
How to Surf for Beginners
How to Dance in a Nightclub
How to Fix a Red Ring of Death
How to Set Up a Blog for Beginners
How to Buy a Guitar
How to Bake a Potato
How to Sell on eBay for Beginners
How to Make Sushi
How to Get an American Express Black Card
How to Play Guitar Hero 3
How to Speak Japanese
How to Download Free Music
How to Play Guitar Chords
How to Play Guitar for Newbies
How to Play Guitar for Newbies Part 2
How to Play Bass Guitar for Newbies
How to Make Perfect Sushi Rice
How to Make a Jello Shot
How to Write a Resume
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.
iPhone 3g — are you getting one or not?
Watching Leo Laporte’s 24 hours of iPhone 3g right now…. are you getting one?
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:
- Easy to read replies
- Replies that can be any length
- Search
- 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 t
witter 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?
- Get stable (duh)
- Get ajax-style replies to work–now. This is critical
- Show images and videos in tweet stream (when linked to)
- Increase the size of replies (and forget about SMS as much).
Please answer the following on your blog:
- What do you think Twitter should do to fight off FriendFeed? Can they?
- Is it too late for Twitter to fend off FF?
- What can we learn from FriendFeed’s drinking of Twitter’s milkshake?
- Does Twitter have any advantage over FF at this point?
- What are the killer features on FF in your mind?
My links:
http://friendfeed.com/jasoncalacanis
http://www.twitter.com/jasoncalacanis
How to make red velvet cake and more…
And now… the week in how to articles:
How to Become a Travel Agent
How to Effectively Manage Your Time
How to Start a Conversation
How to Become a Pharmacist
How to Unclog a Drain
How to Ride a Horse
How to Make Red Velvet Cake
How to Become a Movie Extra
How to Use Twitter
How to Make Chicken Salad
How to Write a Fantasy Novel
How to Saddle a Horse
if you have any suggestions for Mahalo’s How To article group post them in the comments.
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. 
