And the #1 Reason I'm Not Prone to Hack my iPhone is...

I prefer the deliberate variety of iPhone destruction over the "accidents can happen" approach.

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.

Can We Get Everything We Want...for Free?

Fred Wilson wrote a great post about the need for two-way openness. He was referring to the features where you can receive things like Facebook friends’ status updates via RSS. Fred likes that this is available, however it’s not enough for him. He wants two-way openness. He wants to be able to update his status on Facebook via Twitter.

As an end user, I’m right there with Fred Wilson: let me use whatever I want, to do whatever I want! But if I were working at Facebook I’d be scratching my head and thinking, “How the hell are we going to make Fred happy AND generate lots of revenue?”

This, by the way is a problem, for even one-way openness. Especially as RSS usage increases – and I believe this is inevitable because you really can finally create “The Daily Me.”

I read Engadget religiously. But they send full feeds out via RSS, and I never (or hardly ever) actually go to Engadget’s web site. I don’t see ANY of the ads on their site.

I know sites are struggling with full-feed vs. partial feed for this very reason. I’d much rather see Dave Winer focusing on the issue of how to utilize RSS to the fullest and still make money than to worry about Jason Calacanis’ mid-life crisis or Mahalo. And that’s with ONE way communication.

Now enter two way communication. Let’s take Fred’s example. He wants a world where he can find out whatever is happening in his Facebook world via RSS, and he wants to be able to update things via services like Twitter. When will Fred ever actually log on to Facebook? How will Facebook make any money on him?

While Fred and many others (perhaps even me) might be willing to pay $10/mo. for such flexibility, I don’t think the masses would. And maybe that’s the model: Give Fred what he wants, but make him pay.

Will there be a company that rolls up a bunch of great content sites and packages “Full Feed RSS without ads!” for a fee? Will there be subscription models that allow us to use whatever tools we want without actually ever visiting a web site?

I think there will have to be.

Calacanis vs. Winer: Part II

Ah, the drama of the blogsphere. I changed my mind and am switching over to picking Jason Calacanis without even needing to borrow his dog Toro (see part 1).


Dave Winer thinks he's giving good counsel to Jason, and being a good friend. He's full of crap and in this instance being a chucklehead. Not everything is a platform or needs to be. Mahalo isn't. It's a product/service. Dave's biggest complaints seem to be that he doesn't like that he can't make money off Mahalo (oh boo hoo!) and that he doesn't like Jason's style of promotion.

Guess what, it works, it may not work for me, and it may not work for you -- but it most certainly works for Jason! That's probably why Chris Pirillo invited him to Gnomedex!

If Dave has a problem with people promoting commercial stuff at Gnomedex that Dave has no way to capitalize on, he should take that up with Chris P.

Fortunately for Dave Winer, conferences are an open platform. He's certainly welcome to host his own conference where the only presenters of commerical products/services are ones Winer can capitalize on. He can't capitalize on Mahalo. BFD.

As for Mahalo, Jason stick with your plan of getting 25,000 human engineered topics. Mahalo is an open platform in that Dave could sign up to contribute human engineered topics and even get paid for them (sorry, I couldn't resist).

I don't know if Mahalo will work out or not. If it provides more useful search, people will use it. If it doesn't, they won't. That won't have a darn thing to do with whether it's a platform or whether Winer can make money off of it.

Weblogs Inc. wasn't a platform Winer could make money off of. I'm still glad that there's an Engadget.com (and it sends complete articles via RSS, God bless 'em!) and glad that Calacanis was able to make some money off of it.