Mahalo Ombudsman for a Night

Or at least for a few minutes at 2:10am. Jason posted: Mahalo Ombudsman? Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening Tim Faulkner over at Valleywag posted this: Mahalo: Calacanis an iPhone expert, say his underlings. While there are actually some useful links on the page, I think it's fair to complain that there's not a single link to Apple's own site.

I'm agnostic on Mahalo. I don't know if it can succeed but I also am not sure it's doomed to fail. It seems like Mahalo has a while to figure it out and I'm open to seeing how it evolves. I'm not at all agnostic about the Ombudsman concept though and when I went to look at the Mahalo page on iPhone problems (which I never would have seen if not for Valleywag), it raised some questions for the Ombudsman in me.

First of all, I agree with Faulkner, the link to Jason's own twitter-esque posting about Jason's frustration with the lack of cut & paste on the iPhone should not be on a site intended to provide "useful information". But that wasn't what raised the biggest question for me.

When I saw that the page had been authored by Conrad Quilty-Harper who writes for Engadget, with links to stuff Conrad himself had written on Engadget it set off all kinds of flashing red lights about bias (which Jason's Ombudsman post was about).

I confess to being an Engadget junky (hey, I read Valleywag religiously, it's not like I have any shame), but the thing is, aside from a stray self-destructive tendency here and there, I don't believe in the notion of "negative asymmetrical risk". That's just a fancy way of saying I don't believe in things with very little upside and huge downside. The downside here, is that people will question, and rightfully so in this case, Mahalo's bias. Certainly this sort of thing will be mocked on Valleywag, but it would be a legitimate question/concern by anyone who raised it.

My advice: don't use Conrad for technology pieces or at the very least, don't let him link to his own pieces because even if they are the best ones, people will wonder about...bias. It's not worth it. Also, because of Jason's history, Mahalo needs a company stance about linking back to stuff in the Weblogs Inc. empire or risk a lot of flack.

I don't remotely take the hard line stance Faulkner does -- he believes Mahalo is doomed to fail, but Mahalo needs to eradicate any legitimate concerns around bias or Mahalo will be doomed to failure.

While I do not have all the solutions regarding how to handle the perception of "he's linking to his buddies' sites" (c'mon, it's 2:15 a.m.), it's a solvable problem -- and one Mahalo has the time to solve. But they better do it before the Mahalo Beta, whenever that is.

Update: 08/16/07 11:40PDT: Jason e-mailed to say that linking to your own work is against the Mahalo guidelines, but the whole thing was his bad because Conrad (who is an intern) hadn't received the guide training yet. Jason also indicated (and CC'd his QA team) that stuff should never link to his own site unless it was absolutely necessary, requested the link be removed and reassigned the page to someone else...and took the blame for the whole thing. Pretty mensch-y if you ask me.

Is a WYSIWYG Front End Tool For Blogger Coming?

I know it's not right to get my news from Valleywag, but...it's fun. The Wag is reporting that the chief architect of Six Apart (makers of Typepad/Moveable Type) is bailing on Six Apart and heading to Google.

If true, I'm delighted by this news. Why? There's no good software tools available for easily managing the free Blogging tools (like Blogger). Sure, what Blogger gives you with the layout manager is fine. But CSS is a pain in the butt (as in one errant space will screw up your web site). For very basic stuff, the Blogger tools are fine, but when you get into anything outside of the standard 2 column world -- you're on your own.

I've thought for the last 3 months as I've struggled through learning CSS why doesn't Six Apart punt on Typepad and Moveable type and create a great front end for Blogger and WordPress. Moveable Type is supposed to be the best,but it requires server side software that most of end users are never going to be interested in. Just give us a very good front-end WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tool for managing what Blogger already offers on the server side and it will be a very powerful and useful tool. More powerful than Moveable Type simply because of the reach of Blogger/Google.

I think Six Apart missed the opportunity to do this and now it's too late. I can't say I blame them. When I sat around thinking about "Why isn't somebody selling me something for $250-$300 to make this EASY!" the only answer I came up with is, "Google will get around to doing it itself" and I'm sure that's probably what they thought at Six Apart. Looks like they were probably right.

Summer of Love 2007: Scandal in Silicon Valley

OMG OMG OMG!

Michael was paid (gasp) by Microsoft to say something about Microsoft. Gasp again.

Even though it ran where an advertisement normally ran, it was text. Since Michael is a writer and it was text, which is writing, even though it was an ad where an ad was, people might have thought it was not an ad, but just Michael writing.

If people couldn't infer that since it was an ad and Michael was endorsing Microsoft, that Michael wasn't paid...you have to be kidding me!

Nick just couldn't stand for it and posted something on his blog. It sort of made it seem that what had actually transpired was that Pfizer had paid the New York Times to run an endorsement of some new radical cancer drug, and the New York Time's ran the ad on the freaking front page only it looked like a news story.

Meanwhile back in New York, Fred thought Nick was being kind of dumb.

John who was somehow responsible for the thing in the first place took it on the chin and said there should have been some disclosure somewhere that they were paid endorsements. But they were ads and so this strikes me as John trying to make Nick happy without actually making any sense in the process.

Michael thought Om was lacking in fortitude under attack and that John threw him under the bus and I didn't get the impression Michael found John exactly manly in all of this.

Where are the gentle people with flowers in their hair and LSD?

Is the LSD here for "Let's Start Disclosing" or is it "Let's Stay Dumb"?

Disclosure? Do you expect every Lebron James commercial to end with Lebron saying, "Nike pays me to endorse its products."

I know, Lebron isn't a journalist so it's not a valid comparison. But it is, because it's a freaking commercial. I don't care whether Michael is or isn't a journalist. If I see someone endorsing a product in an advertisement, I expect that it's a paid endorsement. Anyone would be safe in always going with that expectation. I do. Disclosures seem pointless if it's a given.

I remember John a little bit from the 1990s. I didn't know him, we may have exchanged a few e-mails. I heard him speak a few times. He struck me then as someone who thought WIRED magazine was more important than the New York Times. He and Nick both are striking me that way now.

Let's look at the subscriber numbers for both.

Let's not and say we did.