The best way to use Twitter is to text "off" to 40404, the service's SMS shortcut number. But failing that, as more and more of us seem to do, here's a list of 10 things Twitter users should not do, inspired by a set of tips at SheGeeks.net. Mostly, since annoying Twitter users are easy to ignore, these rules are for your own safety and sanity. Ignore them at your peril.
Jason Calacanis once told us that he has "all the money." He got it from selling Weblogs Inc. — home of Engadget and Autoblog, among others — to AOL for $25 million. Curious to see what kind of home that kind of money buys in Los Angeles? Check out Kara Swisher's video tour of Calacanis's guest "cottage." Watch out for the bulldogs.
Bonny Pierzina broadcasted from live behind the scenes in Santa Monica for the Mahalo Daily Idol auditions via Justin.tv, and I've been assured that archives will be made available. The three judge panel of Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, DiggNation co-host Alex Albrecht and cantankerous vlogger Loren Feldman voted Valleywag favorite Sarah Atwood on to the second round — glad to hear they didn't hold our endorsement against her. Audition wrap-up from the judges after the jump.
Crack videoblogger Robert Scoble heads to Mahalo to interview bulldog entrepreneur and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Scoble rolls 24 interminable minutes of virtual tape as Calacanis talks about the math of buying monitors and comfy chairs and how the backend of Mahalo works. Forget that. We trimmed the video down to the most important bits: bulldogs and Glengarry Glen Ross-inspired steak knives.
Jason Calacanis makes a list of ways to relieve stress with friends. Our favorite? "g) next time you go to a conference fly there with someone. Mike Arrington, Om Malik and I were all on the same flight to Le Web this past year. It's just great fun to travel together, share movies, and read books." Jason, you're making a mess with all those names you're dropping.
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis made his name running Silicon Alley Reporter back in the 1990s. You'd think Calacanis would be happy to hear that some guy named Gary Sharma has brought the Silicon Alley Report back to the Web. Nope. On his last trip to New York, Calacanis gleefully told a table full of reporters that Dow Jones, which bought the publication from Calacanis back in 2003 — was preparing to sue Sharma's project out of existence. Sharma denies the legal trouble. "Word on the street is that these are just baseless rumors being spread around by that lovable scumbag Jason Calacanis," Sharma tells us. "Maybe he's getting a lil antsy now that SAR 2.0 is getting rave reviews from the Silicon Alley community?" Asked to comment, Peter Kafka, managing editor of Silicon Alley Insider, a blog often confused with Calacanis's old rag, said: "Who?"
A tipster tells us we're off in picking iJustine as the new host for Jason Calacanis's little-watched Mahalo Daily videoblog, previously known solely for featuring former CNET personality Veronica Belmont. "iJustine for Mahalo Daily? Really?" he writes.
We reported — and CEO Jason Calacanis didn't really deny — that Mahalo grosses about $9,000 a month. But don't worry about Mahalo employees. Here, for example, is Mahalo employee Sean Percival's Audi A6. It costs between $43,725 and $57,075 . Obviously, Percival is not a Mahalo guide. Surprisingly, Percival is a Mahalo guide. They only make $30,000 to $35,000, we hear. By the way, if this handy binary to text conversion tool is correct, Percival writes 011000100110000101100100 code. (Photo by Eric Rice)
Who will fill the hole soon-to-depart Mahalo Daily host Veronica Belmont left in Jason Calacanis's heart? He's planning an American Idol-type contest to find out. Rumors peg Pittsburgh-native Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine, as an early favorite. Check out the clip below. In it, iJustine interviews SXSW music attendees to the shortly after SXSW interactive geeks left Austin. "Did you hear they released the iPhone SDK," she asks one music fan. "I don't know what that is" he says. "That's just letters." Good, geek-deprecating stuff. But we're still holding out for Andrew Baron.
At Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis's Dim Sum 2.0 dinner in New York a couple weeks back, I was just within earshot when Calacanis told someone nearby that Mahalo was already profitable. A pleasant surprise, he said. Later, I asked him directly if Mahalo was profitable. "Not yet," he told me. Now a tipster tells us Mahalo isn't even close — with 4 million unique visitors a month on 8 million pageviews, the site's monthly gross is $9,000.
Our commenters are revolting. Specifically, over our continuing coverage of Jason Calacanis, who is famous on the Internet for owning two adorable bulldogs. But there's something charming about the sheer clumsiness of Calacanis's relentless hucksterism. Take the live broadcast he conducted to beg Chris Shipley, the producer of tech-startup conference Demo, to come work on Calacanis and Michael Arrington's rival TechCrunch50 conference. "Be part of the winning team! We are the street level team ... blue collar. Everybody needs to support the Jason Nation." J-Dawg, with that headset look, shouldn't you be playing CounterStrike? And on what planet are you and Arrington "blue-collar"? I can only imagine what Arrington said to you when you tried to put him on the speaker — no doubt something as subtle and polite as "Demo needs to die." The video:
Once the top bulldog, Jason Calacanis had climbed back to No. 2 on Twitterholic, outranked only by Barack Obama — only to be struck from the ranks. Twitterholic is a favored popularity index among The 250 and their many spam-loving followers. The reason for the booting? An April Fools' stunt which was never reversed, putting Robert Scoble back in second, and first in the key chubby, aging white-man demo — and giving us one more reason to hate April Fools' Day.
TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis (did you know that he runs Mahalo?) have announced their second TechCrunch conference: the TechCrunch50, with 10 more companies than last year. The conference will be held over three days — overlapping Demo's fall event. Demo is the startup-launch Arrington and Calacanis are trying to compete against, their distinction being that all finalists are supposedly chosen by "merit," as they define it. The "merit" is so important that TechCrunch head Michael Arrington mentioned it twice in the 248-word announcement. I can't wait.
Mahalo Daily host Veronica Belmont — the videoblogger whom Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis once dubbed a "Rojas-level hire" , in a comparison to Engadget cofounder Peter Rojas — has announced she's "moving on to new projects." She'll host the show for a few more weeks and then later contribute as a correspondent. "This came out of nowhere," a Mahalo source tells us. Considering Belmont's working conditions, it shouldn't have been a surprise. Interviewed in the video clip below, Belmont — who lives in San Francisco — says she spends two weeks each month in Santa Monica. How did Belmont like the commute? "It's not optimal, but it gets the job done." Not anymore. But there is a winner here.
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is an entrepreneur now, but back in the 1990s, he ran a publication called Silicon Alley Reporter. And sometimes, his journalist roots show. Like during this recent interview with The Deal when Calacanis explained who uses Mahalo. Seems 80 percent come from one place and 80 percent from another. Watch for when reporter Mary Kathleen Flynn nods in a big way, as if to say, "Makes perfect sense to me."
