Fun-loving millionaire Jason Calacanis (right) is not joking: He's quit blogging. In a quickie phone call, Calacanis told Valleywag that he felt blogging was taking too much time away from both his work and his family, because of the blogosphere's always-on, why-haven't-you-replied-it's-been-5-minutes nature. Instead, Calacanis is posting his thoughts and observations to an old-school mailing list. He says the list has gathered 500 subscribers since its launch last week. Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of blogging's fair-haired boy. I just subscribed tips@vallewyag.com to the list, and I give it a week at max before someone sets up an automatic system that reposts every one of Calacanis's emails — to a blog. (Photo courtesy of Jason Calacanis)

This... is odd. UK newspaper company Guardian Media Group just bought a blog! For more than $30 million! (To be fair, that's like 10 million quid now probably, but still.) The blog is paidContent; it covers dry internet media news and chronicles lots of important business-y stuff involving "digital media." It's a very nice site, but $30 million? While media stocks tank? For a site whose revenue comes from, like, bankers making money off media deals? Ok, Guardian! It's your money! But there's more good news: this deal will annoy Jason Calacanis!

At the brand new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco last night, the team at European VC firm Wellington Partners celebrated the addition of an outpost in Palo Alto to their existing offices in London and Munich with a swell mixer. The hors d'oeuvres? Cheese gougères, tiny lamb chops, mushroom napoleons, Kobe beef sliders, croutons with creme fraiche, smoked salmon and caviar and a bite-sized tuna tartar, all washed down with French wine which topped $300 a bottle — which, as the joke went, "Is like, what, 20 euros?" Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis explained that for European private equity investors, the American market offers a double-dip:

No, we did not head down to sleepy Palo Alto for the Search SIG meeting featuring small-time players like Mahalo, Wikia and Microsoft, but Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis seems to wish we did. But why bother going when we can get juicy quotes about Jimmy Wales, who founded for-profit Wikia after failing to figure out how to milk Wikipedia for cash from our home office? Those who tuned into Calacanis's Ustream live video channel got juicy quotes like "Guy's got an ethics problem" and "It's naive to think encyclopedias have anything to do with search"? while bemused Wikia representative Jeremie Miller Nick Sullivan sat on the panel. (Wales didn't even show up) You stay classy, Jason! After the jump, a firsthand report from our tipster, including more of Calacanis's wit and wisdom.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident: Wikipedia's Tyranny of the Mob sucks. Every time I run an item about Jimmy Wales, my page gets hacked. So what about Jason Calacanis's pursuit of happiness over at Mahalo? Former Uncov blogger and army of one Ted Dziuba has posted a step-by-step pictorial guide to practicing your First Amendment rights using the search index's new open editorial system. Try this on Wikipedia, and someone from the armed and unregulated Militia of Truth will likely kill your edits on sight. But on Mahalo, only Calacanis's paid mercenaries will bother to fix pages. At $10 an hour, there's no way they'll be able to keep up. Let freedom ring!

If, like me, you've been tricked by super-cute bulldogs into trying Jason Calacanis's Mahalo search engine, you've probably been disappointed by some of Mahalo's results pages. Calacanis has a new message for frustrated users: Fix it yourself. Mahalo now allows anonymous users — tracked by their IP addresses, same as Wikipedia — to edit any guide page. If there's no page for a specific keyword yet, you can create one without a member account. Jason, babe, some cheap advice: Your noncompetitors at the nearly forgotten Citizendium are hosting their monthly Write-a-thon today. How about a Mahalo-a-thon? Every Friday? I'm 100 percent sure you can throw a better party.

Before creating the world's most comprehensive list of videogame cheats, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis worked at AOL under then-CEO Jon Miller. Calacanis joined AOL only after it bought Weblogs Inc. from him for $25 million and since Miller led that acquisition, eventually invested in Mahalo and now sits on the company's board, Calacanis is naturally a little biased in his feelings toward Miller, whom Calacanis considers a mentor. Still, when we heard talk of Miller as a contender to be Yahoo's next CEO, we figured Calacanis's opinions would at least be entertainingly biased. Our email exchange:

Meghan Asha has been tied to notoriously workaholic TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington over the last few months. But could she be tiring of a beau with no work-life balance?

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis is eagerly awaiting Tesla Roadster #16, which he's having painted Tang Orange. Expect lots of updates about how much better a steward of Mother Earth he is than you are. He's also teasing readers with the offer of a Tesla Roadster giveaway, but he needs 30-60 million pageviews to do it. If you could get that much traffic to go Mahalo's way, shouldn't he be offering you the position of CEO? [Calacanis.com] (Photo by wmmarc)

MP3 blog like Peter Rojas's RCRD LBL attract "tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers" reports Fortune. Only they don't attract very many of them. For example, Thefader.com has 93,000 monthly uniques, RCRD LBL, 125,000 and Thetripwire.com about 15,000. So what are these small sites with attractive demographics to do? Hire crafty ad sales teams to sell limited, premium inventory to sponsors desperate to reach their "boutique" audience? No!

Search startup Mahalo's maniacal overlord Jason Calacanis may want employees willing to work themselves to exhaustion in order to make his gamble pay off, but he's not paying particularly well for it — and he's certainly not paying wages that would allow someone to live anywhere near the company's Santa Monica headquarters, much less San Francisco or the Valley. Editorial director C.K. Sample III is looking for remote "guides" to edit search-entry pages for a mere $10 an hour, $0.64 more than San Francisco's minimum wage — and less than some day laborers make standing on the street corners of East L.A. But hey, working from home in your bare feet is so great, it's worth it! After the jump, Mahalo's pitch on Mediabistro.

The class of 2008 has already begun to realize the tragedy of actually having to work for a living. Cheer up, kiddos; it could be worse. You could be employed, part-time, cutting and pasting Google search results for Jason Calacanis's Mahalo. Or you could serve as Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore's personal assistant — the entry-level gigs facing off in our third matchup to determine the worst job in tech. Vote below.

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis has decided to try out Plurk, the latest microblogging platform (after Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and Jaiku) to captivate the 250. Unfortunately for poor Jason, it's hard for him to try out a new social service like a normal person, because every time he signs up for one, he writes on his blog, he gets a result like the image above: "100 invites in about 20 minutes. Such is the cost of Internet fame."

With Silicon Alley Insider suggesting that Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis has a gambling problem, I figured it was time to take the intervention up a notch. Calacanis has endorsed workaholism in the past, leading me to believe that he doesn't take what psychologists have termed "process addiction" particularly seriously. So I sent him the standard twenty questions from Gamblers Anonymous. He was incredulous. "R u asking me to respond to these for a valleywag post?!?" [sic] I suggested he tally up the responses and send that instead — after all, what does he have to worry about? GA suggests seven or more "yes" answers is indicative of a gambling problem. And betting a company's future on raising a venture capital round or angling for a higher valuation ahead of a sale counts.

What's so bad about Mozilla's Toronto workspace? Besides the fluorescent lighting, the colorless white walls and the folding tables, the worst thing about Mozilla's Toronto workspace is how we're sure management would improve it. With corporate graffiti, company logos and too many colors. That was management's trick at Facebook and look where readers ranked it in our poll on tech's ten worst workspaces — as tech's second-worst workspace, just after Mozilla. Check out the full list, below.

After reviewing our post "The 10 worst workspaces in tech," commenter AdmNaismith described Facebook's office, pictured above, as "foggy, dank, dim, and utterly depressing." Commenter mothra1 hated Yahoo's New York offices more: "They suck! Lifeless and impersonal. Kinda like the douchebags who still actually work there." Meanwhile, Adobe apologist BlairHapjo told us we "clearly didn't get past Adobe's lobby," and the rest of the office features "Aeron chairs, real offices (with doors!), big picture windows." For us, the worst offices we found on Office Snapshots and elsewhere were the the ones that try too hard to seem Internet-hip, like Jajah and Google. Now it's time to settle the disputes. Below, vote for your least favorite and help us rank tech's 10 most dismal places to work:

We've toured the top 10 workspaces in tech. Click to viewNow, we've gone back to Office Snapshots to find the 10 worst. What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem "Internet-y" — come off even worse. We'll start with Yahoo's New York digs.

Few people outside Silicon Valley have heard of Roelof Botha. But the former CFO of PayPal is famous here. His two claims to fame: negotiating that company's $1.5 billion sale to eBay, and later, as a partner at Sequoia Capital, investing in YouTube and quickly flipping the startup to Google for $1.65 billion. Is it a coincidence that that figure is 10 percent higher than his PayPal score? Few insiders think so. Botha gets four pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good — more than Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Other figures who appear on the second page of her Web 2.0 book's index: John Battelle, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook board member Jim Breyer, blog blowhard Jason Calacanis, and YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, whom Botha made quite wealthy.

Mahalo

Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis not only pays his "guides" between $30,000 and $35,000 a year, he also houses them in what appears to be a poorly lit, post-apocalyptic strip mall. (Photos by Conrad)