The Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo founder held up a series of signs at last night's Yankee-Angels game, including "Yanks in 5 Games" and "Jeter for MVP." Assisting him were two other Web entrepreneurs: Josh Harris (founder of dot-com webcasting company Psuedo.com, star of the documentary We Live in Public, and current boarder in Calacanis' pool house) and Brian Alvey (founder of publishing technology company Crowd Fusion).

Calacanis and Harris managed to get their picture in the Daily News, but not to fight off the guards in Anaheim. Harris tells us:

We had a sign that said "Jeter for MVP" but it got ripped out of our hands by pissed off stadium security guards after Calacanis got under their skin. I am still a huge fan even after Jeter got my space at 600 Broadway.

Psuedo.com used to be headquartered on the top floors of 600 Broadway; Jeter subsequently built a gym on the top three floors. We're not sure if Calacanis will be at Game 5 of the Yankees' American League Championship Series against the Angels on Thursday night, but it's entirely possible he'll learn something about evictions of his own if he attends and keeps up his antics. And that's one public spectacle we'd love to see.

(Pic: Calacanis by Joi Ito)

Calacanis had proclaimed on Twitter and in a YouTube interview the end of the TechCrunch 50, the Web startup conference the Mahalo founder hosts with Arrington. Calacanis had told others at this year's conference about a fight with TechCrunch.com publisher Arrington, VentureBeat reported. Arrington played the blasé diva when we called him for comment, saying, "I'm not going to say I didn't have words with him because I have words with people all the time... life will go on without Jason Calacanis."

Now, Calacanis tells VentureBeat, the conference is back on. The short celebrity gladhander has a vested interest in reprising his odd couple conference routine with Arrington, the tall, beefy self-styled don of the Valley's hopelessly geeky startup scene: In an economic environment where other conferences are struggling, TechCrunch 50 remains a financial success for Calacanis and Arrington and, more to the point, a fantastically powerful vehicle for publicity and influence. And, besides, with the name tied to Arrington's trademark, what's to keep him from doing it without Calacanis?

It must be a bit embarrassing for Calacanis to crawl back to Arrington after so loudly storming off. To salvage his dignity, he's now claiming, to VentureBeat, that he was only kidding around, in part because the YouTube interview was conducted by a puppet:

[16:05] jasoncalacanis: I'm just shocked folks are taking this seriously. I mean… a puppet. It was in fact, a puppet.

[16:05] jasoncalacanis: then again, i guess if you hear mike and i fighting it isn't pleasant.

[16:06] paulboutin@mac.com: You were all too convincing. I think you really were Done With This Baloney when you talked to the puppet.

[16:06] paulboutin@mac.com: The makeup video is cute. I'm running it with your quotes.

[16:06] jasoncalacanis: Truth = we fight like rabid dogs and neither of us have to compromise in any other parts of our business.

[16:07] jasoncalacanis: False = we would throw an amazing event like this out the window.

(Top pic: Andrew Mager)

No one is saying precisely what happened. But Calacanis, a Hollywood internet entrepreneur who tools around in a Tesla Roadster and is buddy-buddy with Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, has tweeted that TechCrunch 50, which the men co-host, is over after its third iteration. He also "openly talked about a fight" with Arrington to others at the conference, Paul Boutin reports on VentureBeat.com.

Calacanis seemed to confirm all this to, of all people, a puppet controlled by New York humorist Loren Feldman (see left).

And Arrington, who publishes the influential Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, isn't quite denying it either. Arrington cautioned in a phone interview that he wasn't familiar with all of Calacanis' public statements today. But he added, "I'm not going to say I didn't have words with him because I have words with people all the time." Besides, he added, things are crazy at the end of a long conference.

He wouldn't get into details, but did point us, in response to questions about the incident, to a blog post he recently wrote called Let's Not Let Silicon Valley Become Just Like Hollywood, in which he argues that the powers-that-be in the Northern California tech scene should avoid becoming as pompous and hierarchical as the folks in Hollywood, i.e. the people Calacanis likes to hang out with. Cryptic. But Arrington wouldn't be much more specific: "I'm not too concerned Jason is telling people he doesnt want to talk to me. I'm sure life will go on without Jason Calacanis and the drama he creates by talking to puppets."

Sure, life will go on, and in the meantime the rest of us have another tech feud to keep us entertained. It's been too long since one of these flared up.

(Speaking of which, we've logged several emails and instant messages to Calacanis and have yet to hear back. If you have any insights into what happened, please email us.)

(Top pic: Calacanis, left, and Arrington in happier days, by Frank Gruber.)

ASCAP licenses the performance rights for music, collecting royalties for its songwriter members when their songs are played in certain contexts.

Those contexts now include a YouTube video embedded on your blog or website, assuming your site is not "purely" non-commercial and is deemed large enough by ASCAP. The group just sent a collection letter to internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis (pictured) for YouTube videos embedded on his Mahalo reference site. Based on what the group told Valleywag, other startups should be worried:

ASCAP does not offer licenses to – or require licenses from – those who simply make their personal blogs available on purely noncommercial Web sites. Mahalo.com is a larger venture than simply a personal blog, and therefore ASCAP is engaged in discussions with Mr. Calacanis concerning the use of ASCAP members' music on the site.

ASCAP sent collection letters to other website owners in the spring; YouTube told recipients to refer the group back to YouTube. But then a judge ruled Google owed ASCAP $1.6 million while a court fight between the two sides over licensing drags on. At some point, website owners are going to start wondering how much longer Google will offer to handle all the legal complaints over YouTube embeds — and just how many songs they've embedded over the years and now owe royalties on.

(Pic: by David Sifry)

MSNBC's David Shuster lamented the lack of a spectacular and public end to a high-speed car chase.

After chatting with actor Ben Stiller, cyclist Lane Armstrong confirmed to a grateful public the existence of Dodgeball 2.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis explained to TechCrunch's Mike Arrington exactly how grating Arrington is; the positively scientific observation included a citation.

Business Insider's John Carney discovered financial politics had made heiress Lydia Hearst his strange bedfellow. He didn't seem particularly annoyed.

Time's James Poniewozik spent basically all day trying to pronounce the name of Dan Abrams' blog, Mediaite.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Some of the Twitterati, it seems, were cranky. Others just overheard cranky people. And still others managed to laugh things off.

You know what's a "tragedy?" The way Food Network chef Tyler Florence's publicity tour is shaping up!

You know what sucks about taking a private jet to the resort town of Aspen? If you're motion-sick Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, everything.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball found someone who actually finds the New York Times too timely.

The Hollywood Reporter's Matt Belloni posted a facetious nightlife review.

Chris Anderson recognized that Free publicity was the silver lining in Condé Nast colleague Malcolm Gladwell's not-so-friendly review of his book.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Timesman-in-chief Bill Keller shilled for the Gray Lady.

Mahalo funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis offered a metaphor for his career.

AllThingsD daddyblogger Peter Kafka experienced technical difficulties.

Rachel Nixon discovered there are media jobs to be had in Canada. (Let's all move north!)

Videoblogger talent rep George Ruiz blended in with the suits better than he thought.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Can one blame Calacanis? After a blog named him as a candidate for the job, based on speculation over his friendship with new News Corp. digital executive Jon Miller, he grabbed the opportunity to treat it seriously with nonstop "no comments." Even after former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta was revealed as the real candidate News Corp. was considering to run its social network, Calacanis has maintained the serious pose. (Everyone knows his current gig is going nowhere. We'd love to read the memo on what to do with his overgrown Web directory, Mahalo.)

Now he's penned a memo on what the next CEO of MySpace should do.

His memo is a grab gag of the trendy (virtual currencies!) and the obvious (fix the website!). It's standard fare for Calacanis, a Brooklyn-raised hustler who has made an art of talking more loudly than anyone surrounding him, in the hopes that people incapable of grasping the obvious will follow him.

Wait a second: "People incapable of grasping the obvious." We take it back. He's exactly the man MySpace needs.

Van Natta, who has long aspired to run a consumer Internet startup, is an obvious choice. Having fallen out of favor with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's fickle 24-year-old CEO, he is spending his exile running a music startup, called Project Playlist, out of an office building shared with Facebook. While Van Natta has managed to extricate Playlist from some of its legal troubles with the music labels, it hardly seems like a gig that encompasses his ambitions. Having worked for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as well as Zuckerberg, Van Natta seems capable of dealing with a testy owner-CEO like Rupert Murdoch.

Calacanis, meanwhile, has no qualifications for the job. He tanked his first media company, then sold his second one, Weblogs Inc., for $25 million to AOL, where he accomplished nothing of note after the acquisition. He's since raised far too much money for Mahalo, a Web 2.0 rehash of Yahoo's 1995-era Web directory. Silicon Alley Insider thinks he should be MySpace's new CEO because he worships Jon Miller, the former AOL CEO who played mentor to him before Miller was fired and Calacanis quit. Ever the clever fameball, Calacanis is playing coy and saying "No comment" as loudly as possible.

Miller now runs News Corp.'s Internet operations, so he's the one to pick DeWolfe's successor. We have a suggestion: Hire both! Van Natta can do the hard work of fixing MySpace. While he's affable enough, he hardly seems to crave attention.

Tom Anderson, DeWolfe's sleazy sidekick at MySpace, is every MySpace user's first friend when they sign up. He needs a replacement, too. Why not replace him with Calacanis, the ultimate Web fameball, who seems to measure his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers? He doesn't need any other responsibilities. And as MySpace's Chief Ego Officer, he can still claim to be CEO.

For all the Mahalo employment horror stories out there — the company boasts one of the 10 worst entry-level gigs in Silicon Valley — its founder can treat people well when he chooses to.

For example, the tech entrepreneur likes to brag about and flaunt his connection to celebrity Twitterers Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, who he advises, if only informally, on internet brand building.

Calacanis also has a soft spot for those who must wait on him hand and foot: Calacanis recently congratulated himself on Twitter for "giving 50-100% tips for the last couple of months. My wife called it the JCAL stimulus plan."

We're happy to see Calacanis pumping his blog riches into the economy one entrée at a time; if more of America's wealthy embrace this sort of conspicuous consumption once again, the recession will be over that much sooner. On the other hand, we might feel differently if we actually, you know, had to work for the guy in a non-servant capacity.

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

• 1. Julia Allison
• 2. Twitter
• 3. Jason Calacanis
• 4. Wikipedia
• 5. Henry Blodget
• 6. Dave Winer
• 7. Blogs
• 8. Dead newspapers everywhere
• 9. Congressman Jared Polis
• 10. Robert Scoble
• 11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
• 12. Digg
• 13. Perez Hilton
• 14. /b/
• 15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
• 16. Oversharing
• 17. Mark Zuckerberg
• 18. Chris Crocker
• 19. Internet commenters
• 20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

Poor Williams! He's just the latest target of Winer's wrath. The irascible Internet fussbudget has gotten mad at Jason Calacanis for being self-promotional, mad at Internet commenters who do not acknowledge his contributions to the Internet, mad at Twitter for not doing what he says, and mad at Hillary Clinton for being alive. (We've also long suspected that he is secretly mad at the New York Times because they will not hire him as a columnist and run his verbal spew unedited.)

But Winer's latest rant is hilariously hypocritical.

Williams's sin, according to Winer, is playing favorites with Twitter's "Suggested Users" page, a feature meant to help bewildered new Twitter users navigate the messaging service's real-time, 140-character spasms of pointless puffery. He writes:

I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...

Think about it this way — do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones — they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now.

Makes sense! Who would want the phone company to do that? Except Winer did the exact same thing himself with his own blog-software company, Userland Software, in 2003, writes former employee Rogers Cadenhead. Moreover, unlike Twitter's Williams, he actually took money to promote a blogger — former MTV veejay Adam Curry. In 2003, Curry wrote:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...

The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

Williams hasn't said anything about charging for placement on the Suggested page, but it can generated tens of thousands of new followers a day for featured Twitter accounts. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis — yes, the one Winer feuded with — has offered to pay $250,000 to get featured on it. Which makes us think: Winer isn't mad at Williams because he's playing favorites. Winer is jealous because Williams is far more effective at playing favorites than Winer will ever be.

In a mass email, Calacanis wrote that he and Mahalo's CTO, Mark Jeffrey, were ignorant of Schiefer's background, even though his 2007 guilty plea to installing malware was easily found on Google.

We didn't know John was convicted of infecting 250,000 computers with bots when we hired him. We have a rigorous hiring process at Mahalo, in which each candidate must go through an average of five to eight interviews, and in which at least three, but more typically five, references are checked. Our CTO, and one of my oldest friends, Mark Jeffrey, did all of this with John, and he passed with flying colors.

However, Mark screwed up by not doing a simple Google search on John's name. If Mark had, he would have easily found out about these crimes, we would never have hired John, and I would not be writing this letter. Why would we even take the risk of hiring a felon hacker? No one would, right?

Calacanis makes a rousing defense of Schiefer, saying the experience of watching an employee get sentenced to four years in jail has taught him powerful lessons about redemption and rehabilitation. He excuses Schiefer's crimes by saying, essentially, that everyone does it and that Schiefer was abused as a child.

However, I consider myself a fairly decent judge of character, and after spending months with John, I'm convinced he was an angry stupid kid when he launched his botnet attack (which did .000000001% of the damage it could have). Now he's an adult who just wants to make a decent living, spend time with his significant other and breathe the clean air off the Pacific Ocean by our offices in Santa Monica.

Perhaps that's all true. But it certainly seems embarrassing for a guy who's been entrusted with $21 million by investors to build a better search engine to admit he let a felon into the office without bothering to do a simple search first. May we suggest you add this search to your rewrite list?

An informant familiar with the startup's excursion tells us that Calacanis had instructed workers to dress warmly and expect to be away from the office all day. This provoked a frisson of excitement, as rumor spread that Calacanis had sold Mahalo and the trip would be a chance to meet their new owner.

How depressing, then, to find themselves greeted by Mickey Mouse in Anaheim, Calif. "I am assuming he forced them to leave their phones behind to avoid all the Twitters of how much it sucked," our tipster tells us.

During the beta of Mahalo Answers, a service where users pay others to conduct Google searches for them using a faked-up currency, one tester asked, "Is Jason Calacanis cool?" An accurate answer: "Despite the bulldogs and the Brentwood mansion, no, not particularly." But instead, an ex-employee unloaded all the rage she'd stored up since getting laid off from her job at Mahalo this summer. Calacanis has his minions delete the entry, but we've obtained screenshots of the uncensored page. It's a soon-to-be-legendary rant.

I've been wondering when this generation of Web companies would come up with an answer to Flooz and Beenz, the made-up Internet currencies of the dotcom bubble. How foolish of me not to realize that Calacanis, who has recycled so many other ideas (Web directories, wikis, crowdsourcing) in his failed quest to create a successful Web business, would be the one to revive this failed idea.

If you don't recall Flooz and Beenz, they were made-up currencies that websites could use to reward users, who would then spend them on real online purchases. Both went under in 2001, leaving their means of exchange worthless.

Mahalo Dollars have a more limited purpose: People with questions they're too lazy to Google can buy Calacanis's fake money with real coin, and then pay freelance Internet researchers to answer their questions.

The pay-to-search business is a lousy one. Google, which tried a similar scheme with real money, gave up on it last year. ChaCha, a Midwestern startup pursuing a similar idea, has had no apparent success.

I'm sure Calacanis will make some money in the short term by skimming currency-exchange fees from the suckers he gets to sign up. Eventually, the currency will collapse faster than the Indonesian rupiah did in the '90s. But by that time, he'll be on to some other scheme.

It's actually not surprising that Calacanis has attracted a small group of loyal followers who hang on his every word. Let's review the evidence: He ran a tech magazine in the '90s but failed to cash out big. Dumb! He sold a bunch of blogs to AOL for $25 million in 2005, before everyone figured out blogs weren't worth very much. Smart! He squeezed $40 million out of Sequoia Capital, a notoriously tightfisted venture-capital firm, before things went bust in the Valley and Sequoia started telling everyone to lay people off. Smart! He stopped blogging when he realized that it just gave angry people on the Internet a platform to bash him. Smart!

Flipping startups is one thing. Saving the country is another. Calacanis believes we can all just work our way out of the recession. That's a horribly bad idea, blogger Nick Baily explains.

Calacanis's "120 percent solution," boiled down, tells us to work 20 percent harder and cut up our credit cards. But he doesn't take basic supply and demand into account.

Let's say we work more and produce more. Who's going to consume whatever it is we're producing — cars, cell phones, useless Web-directory pages? Us, right? But wait — we followed Jason's advice and stopped buying things. More stuff, fewer people buying it leads to a massive deflationary price spiral. Japan tried this, and it did not work out very well.

Calacanis's U.S.-first scheme could work, I suppose, if we could find someone else to do all the buying. But it turns out most people overseas hate buying things. China, the next great consumer marketplace? Notoriously cheap. Likewise most of the rest of Asia. Russia, the home of so many new millionaires? If gas goes to $1, they're all broke, too. Same for the Middle East. Shoppers in India might buy things, but — oh, right — we just fired all of the outsourcing workers we decided we no longer needed.

So what do we do? Repairing bridges and roads and building high-speed trains sounds like a good idea. But spinning our wheels 20 percent harder, as Calacanis proposes? That gets us nowhere fast. The best part of this market implosion surely must be that Internet CEOs are no longer regarded as economic savants.

Web 2.0 was a bubble that never inflated — a shimmery illusion that popped well before we stopped talking about it. Precious few people got rich from the notions its proponents championed, such as user-generated content and social networks.

Calacanis was the only person of note to cash out on the blogging craze, selling a set of blogs to AOL for $25 million. That was a paltry figure in the grand scheme of things, but enough to set him up in a comfortable home in Brentwood and buy him a $109,000 electric sports car. And enough to make him a Web celebrity, with thousands of followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook — the quantifiable metrics of fame preferred by those who are not really famous.

The startups of the Web 2.0 era have proven similarly vacuous in their success. Skype, the Internet-calling service, sold for $2.6 billion to eBay in 2005; the auction giant wrote off $1.4 billion of that purchase last year. YouTube, sold to Google for $1.65 billion, is an acknowledged failure, with product managers scrambling to bedaub it with enough advertising to merely pay for its bandwidth bills. And the IPO market that powered the '90s bubble? All but invisible. The most recent big offering was in August for Rackspace, a boring company which hosts servers, and its stock has since fallen by half. With Wall Street on its knees, no one expects another IPO soon.

Will there be another bubble? Technology moves in cycles and is prone to investing fads, so yes, almost certainly. But there is nothing that looks set to inflate it. Cleantech, the next big hope of Silicon Valley, requires vastly more capital than Internet startups, and capital is now in short supply. (Falling oil prices, too, discourage the development of green energy.) While Internet users are devoting more attention to social networks, advertisers are staying away. Calacanis's venture, Mahalo, is a spiffed-up rehash of the kind of Web directory Yahoo built in 1995; he's now cooking up a new, secret project — which suggests that the loquacious entrepreneur realizes his original plan fell short. He may be onto something, if only in admitting failure. If this bubble fell short in making the likes of Calacanis rich, they have their own paucity of ideas to blame.

Right now I'm locked down polishing off the details of Project A—a new product which that Mahalo is launching in December. We think we've created the right product for our troubled times, and the progress made over the past month by our tech team has been nothing short of amazing (thanks guys). There are many smart folks with lots of knowledge that are un - or underemployed right now and who are looking to make some extra scratch. Project A should help them. I'm going to be looking for some beta testers in a week or two and I'll be pinging some of you (if you're smart, like helping others, and have time on your hands you'll really like it).