Ok, so it’s not really breaking news. Let me explain what I’m going at here.

I believe as a service, Mahalo is useless. I’ll provide more information on that later, but I’m here with some evidence that Mahalo is propped up simply by the popularity and shameless promotion of it’s founder, and has nothing to do with it’s own success.

I’m a regular user of popurls.com. They simply display popular RSS feeds from around the net. Making it into the single-story feeds is one belonging to Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo. My disdain for Jason is not based on Mahalo so much as Jason’s character. Personally, I see him as a self absorbed ego maniac who shamelessly promotes himself to the point of raw annoyance. I’m sure on the short term, Jason is a cool guy to hang out with… but being part of the tech community I’m tired of running into his self endorsement antics.

After browsing popurls tonight, I saw yet another Mahalo title endorsement. I decided to do a little quick google research and discovered some annoying information trends.

Mahalo mentions among blogs

So what’s this mean?

While the volume of posts a blog makes are completely relevant (Rev2, for example, doesn’t post nearly as much as Mashable), the sheer number of stories from RWW and TC that mention Mahalo as opposed to the relatively few from Mashable and CenterNetworks indicate a bias toward Calacanis. The fact is, Mahalo simply is not news. It’s a list of links collected by humans. The sites that report real news in the tech community don’t bother mentioning Mahalo as much as the Calacanis-connected organizations simply because Mahalo is not relevant tech news.

Mahalo does nothing interesting

At best, Mahalo is kind of a half-assed wikipedia. It’s not a search engine… it’s more of a human powered directory. It can’t defeat Google because it rides on the back of Google. Every link gathered on Mahalo was found from a real search engine or social bookmarking site. Mahalo has no spiders or automated indexing services. It can never be faster than the search engines because it relies on the search engines for it’s information! And, it can never be more profitable in it’s current situation because the only known route to profit has to do with Google ads showing up on Mahalo pages.

In summary, I’m sick and tired of reading about this acquisition bait. Mahalo’s entire business structure is wasteful in terms of employees and earning money, and as such it can never succeed as a business. If it’s acquired, it adds no value on it’s own and could only, at best, serve to prop up a profitable service. This in itself would destroy the appeal of the site, because it would mean more ads on all of the pages.

So, that’s it. No relevancy. Not real news. Propped up by Calacanis and his buddies as acquisition bait. Time to move on, nothing to see here.

I’m not afraid. I’ll say it point blank. Michael Arrington does not deserve the success he has reached with TechCrunch. At what point do you abandon, disregard and disrespect your readers? What’s it worth?

The Scenario

Apparently, for Mike, all it takes is the promise of news coverage from Fox News to become a traitor to his readers. In case you’re unaware, TechCrunch officially endorsed two technology presidents; one from each major political party. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama. On the Republican side, John McCain.

The notion put forth was this, and I quote:

TechCrunch will endorse one candidate from each the Democratic and Republican party as the pro-tech candidate based on the popular results of reader voting and blog input from our community of technology leaders and entrepreneurs.

The Problem

It stands to reason that on the Republican side of this “tech primary”, Ron Paul would have won by a landslide. With 73%, he far overshadowed the second place runner of 16%, John McCain.

So why then, did John McCain get the TechCrunch endorsement? It wasn’t from popular result. John McCain didn’t have one-fourth the votes that Ron Paul received. According to Mike, his reasons include Ron Paul being against net neutrality and the FCC regulation of the wireless spectrum. According to the readers, that doesn’t matter, and I think Mike missed a very big part of what makes Ron Paul the landslide winner of the TechCrunch Primaries.

Ron Paul is for limited government. This means even government regulation of things like the wireless spectrum and how much net providers can charge. The thing Mike missed is that under a Ron Paul presidency, a monopoly would be a very hard thing to maintain. Ron Paul is an economist and for free market economy. This means that monopolies cannot survive because their competitors can simply undershoot them. Even in a market monopoly like the cable companies offer (relating to net neutrality), a competitor will pop up that doesn’t support a pay-for-higher-usage scheme.

As for McCain? He knows nothing of technology, and admittedly knows nothing of economics. These are issues that matter greatly to the tech sector, which as Mike has admitted is generally libertarian leaning. In fact, according to the TechCrunch primaries issue, John McCain is against net neutrality as well! In fact, in all the issues listed as the reason for endorsing McCain, he had the same stance as Ron Paul. So where do your allegiances lie, Mike?

To Mike Directly

You should believe your readers. You are not smarter than a crowd of of 10,000 voters (the amount of people who voted in the Republican “tech primary”). To go against not only your readers votes, but even your own word that popular opinion would determine the outcome is an abomination. You don’t respect your readers, and you don’t deserve the success you’ve attained.

Was the promise of Fox News coverage too much to resist? They’re notorious for being anti Ron Paul, and you’ve been parading the video of yourself on Fox News to anyone with eyeballs.

After Duncan Riley’s antics, I was glad to see you step in and start reporting on tech news again… but I sadly took TC out of my feed reader last week. Now, I’m glad I did. You don’t deserve my time and attention span, Michael. You should probably concede to better people and consider a return to domain vulching for a living.

My Disclaimer

I am a Ron Paul supporter. My websites have been featured on TechCrunch a couple of times. I do stand to lose credibility with Mike and the awesome promotional powers TechCrunch can garner. I’m not afraid, however, to call Mr. Arrogant a shill to his face. I wash my hands of you, Mike.

Everyone is up in arms today about Ford apparently calling people pirates, trademark violators, etc. This story is a lie.

I used to own the largest Ford Escort site on the internet. In 2000, we tried to get a calendar printed through CafePress, and were told that CafePress would not print the calendar because it contained trademarked images (the vehicles). That’s it, end of story. Ford did not stop the printing of any calendars, they did not sue anybody, and truth be told they probably didn’t even write a nastygram to get their cars not printed any longer.

Everybody is seriously over reacting. It started with the sensationalist headline of the post on Black Mustang Club, and spread from there. I doubt that 90% of the people commenting with hate for Ford even read the article and/or post it belongs to. BMC, you are not being picked on. This has been CafePress’s policy for at least 8 years.

Here’s the post I made on BMC:

Ok guys, I’ve been trying to reply to this thread all day.

The title of this thread is kind of sensationalist, and is untrue. Ford was never the one blocking your calendar from being made.

In 2000, I owned the largest ford escort site on the net. We tried to get a calendar printed up using our members photos. Cafepress refused to print it, and when I contacted them, they said I didn’t own the trademark that belonged to the cars pictured.

That’s it, end of story. Ford never said they own your images. They do, however, own the trademark to the image of the vehicle and are completely within their right to stop anyone from profiting because of it. I’m positive Ford would not have a problem with BMC making a calendar though, and as I believe I saw earlier in this thread, they were OK with it.

I used to get Ford.com IP addresses in my logs all the time and Ford never contacted me. I no longer even own a Ford, but I’m still just trying to set the record straight before however many of you swear off buying a Ford… they’re not the ones behind this. It’s been CafePress’s policy for at least 8 years.

UPDATE: Jakob didn’t even create the norbum.org site — We’re both assholes.

So that little snowball I started a few days ago led up to a post by Hank Williams titled “Williams: Jakob Lodwick and David Karp are assholes.” (The title has since been updated).

You see, the idea behind Jakob’s original post was obviously to have some fun tempting random passerbys to figure out his new URLs. In doing so, I was having fun by speculating what it was he was working on. I had more fun with it yesterday. Is this news? Hardly.

Jakob decided to have some fun based on a user comment. The user’s comment was that “maybe it’s a crowd sourcing effort about Nordstrom’s new lineup for bums.” This is pretty funny by itself, given the odd domain name. Jakob had some fun with it by posting the quick little site that he made. Is this a giant morally wrong thing to do? Not really. It was done in lighthearted fun. We’re all having fun here except you, Hank.

Somehow, Jakob invoked your protective gene and you went as far as calling him David assholes on a pretty well-read blog. This is fine, as you have your opinion, but please remember what the power of a readerbase can do to someone’s reputation.

In all actuality, posting photos of the homeless is hardly making fun of them. Saying a website is about homeless fashion is not offensive.

That said, the thing that prompted me to post this wasn’t your anger — it was your use of race to draw a parallel between your feelings and the feelings of homeless people. I would like to know how being black has anything to do with being homeless. Are you saying that because you’re black you’ve faced ridicule? Do you think you’re less welcome in the tech community because you’re black? Would you be upset if someone made a website about the fashion of black people and African Americans? If you’re going to draw a parallel, please don’t play the race card. Given that you’ve only posted 3 times in the last year on your own blog, I can see something had to upset you.

Lighten up a bit. Have fun with life. This isn’t as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be, unless you think you’ve found your cause… in which case there are far more important ways to protect the homeless in this world.

If you want a parallel, I’ve got one for you. I’ve been homeless before. Although it was relatively brief compared to a lot of people in this country (a few weeks), it was still the worst experience of my life. I can promise you, I would much rather be black than homeless. Do you see now why I consider your parallel to be asinine? The next time you decide to call someone an asshole, make sure you’re not being one yourself.

I’ve been lightly following a certain set of stories regarding Adobe phoning home whenever you start up CS3 products. The basic idea is this; When you start a CS3 product, it sends a few packets of information to 192.168.112.2o7.net, which is actually just a subdomain for the website 2o7.net, which is owned by Omniture, a statistics company.

I’m not saying they’re giving away my social security number, I’m not saying there are even any privacy issues here. However, two things are awry in this scenario. The first is that they’re trying to hide the website address by disguising it as a local-looking IP address. The second is that they’re phoning home, no matter what the information is, without my permission.

Guess what, Adobe? THIS IS SPYWARE.

John Nack, the product manager for Adobe Photoshop, took it upon himself today to write a blog post about the situation. In this post, Mr Nack is lashing out at users and customers without providing a single answer.

The main point that John keeps bringing up is that a lot of people are on holiday, so it’s the perfect time to put up some major speculative post, because the companies involved won’t be able to respond. He likens it to 2 posts that have occured in the past two consecutive years… which are also about Adobe.

John, I think you’re a little too concerned with yourself. The prior posts and this one occurring around the holidays are merely coincidence.

In addition, John, you quoted Doug Miller saying that “There are only 3 places we track things via Omniture anywhere in or around our products”. Given that this 2o7.net example was not listed, it makes this statement inaccurate and therefore quotable with a grain of salt. You can’t deny that the products are contacting 2o7.net… so there are 4 places you track things via Omniture.

Nowhere in your post do you address the following; 1) Why is the address intended to be hidden? 2) What information is Adobe collecting?

Instead of peddling the idea that your customers and users are crying wolf, and instead of defending yourself to the point of insulting your customers intelligence (Crying wolf?? No common sense??), you should concentrate on finding out the real reason behind the 2o7.net domain.

Until then, you should probably shut your mouth before your foot ends up in it. Oh, and run your post by HR next time if you want to save a bit of face.