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)

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.

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.

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.

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).

Highly profitable About.com contributes nearly half as much operating cash flow to the Times Company as the news operations, so it would be tough to lose. But that profitability, plus decent growth prospects, also makes it an easier sell. Newspapers like the Boston Globe or the Times Company's regional newspaper chain seem unlikely to fetch much given the state of the industry.

Though online advertising has come in for its share of trouble recently, About.com features, along with conventional banner ads, the sort of contextual text advertising expected to fare better in the downturn than banners.

And cash from a sale could be used to take the Times private, which we heard last week was under discussion, to be funded by the sale of assets like About.com.

The Times in January shot down rumors it was looking to offload About.com. But the company now finds itself in a very different environment. And it would be in keeping with the company's character to face new choices by conserving the hard core of its journalism franchise, even at the expense of more profitable units.

The big unknown, assuming sale rumors are true, is whether the company will be able to find a buyer. If not, it may well have to abandon its sunny forecast regarding job reductions.

(Click the video at top to listen to the original audio. The About.com comment comes around the 00:45 remaining mark.)

The paradox of the death spiral is that many pilots actually believe
they are stabilizing their plane when they are actually tilting it.

What is "The Death Spiral"?
====================
The death spiral for startups is like the condition that occurs to pilots when they fly into "weather." The "weather" right now is the massive confusion and uncertainty of the financial and consumer markets.

We can now operate past 2012 even if we never make any advertising revenue, and truth be told, building advertising-based companies is my specialty (the last two, Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. each broke 10m a year revenue between their third and fourth years).

Perhaps we're being too conservative, but I've rarely heard of companies that went out of business because they made cuts too early, and I've heard of many who have reported the opposite.

Take notes, Taurus. That's the new story. Stick to it. Be strong. Profits are so 2013. Did you have a layoff? No? Too late. Now let's go out there and kill it again! (Photo of Jason and Toro from 2005 for Wired by Emily Shur)

Developers/Senior Developers (Santa Monica)

Reply to: job-894125901@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-10-26, 10:07AM PDT

Do you know that you're amongst the very best, but can't find a company that appreciates you or gives you the opportunity you deserve?

Mahalo.com is a human-powered search engine. It is one of the hottest startups on the planet right now. We're well-funded by the same people that backed Google, Yahoo and YouTube (Sequoia), a well as Newscorp, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk (Paypal) and CBS. Our human-curated results are the very best starting page for any topic you can think of, blowing away machine-only search engines. And our growth curve has been phenomenal: this coming year ought to be downright amazing.

We're looking for top-notch Developers and Senior Developers to get us to the next level.

Skills we're looking for include the following (you should have a subset of these, all are not required):
* Python, PHP
* C/C++, Java
* MySQL
* Familiarity with MediaWiki
* memcache, squid
* Strong command of PHP5
* Familiar with general Internet technologies including HTML, XML, Javascript, HTTP, CSS, cookies, etc.
* Knowledge and experience in Apache, MySQL, Linux

Bonus:
* Hadoop / Hbase
* Lucene
* Nutch
* Spread

You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter with the "general get it factor". You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.

We work with cutting-edge technologies. You will learn more here in a month than most companies will teach in a year.

Although we work hard, we offer a laid-back environment, competitive salary, benefits and stock options. This is a potentially life-changing opportunity — the kind that is usually only available in Silicon Valley, and is extremely rare in Southern California. If you're excellent, we invite you to come join us.

Please send a RESUME.

Location: Santa Monica
Compensation: Commensurate with experience + Options
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
PostingID: 894125901

From: jason@calacanis.com
Subject: [Jason] How to handle layoffs
Date: October 22, 2008 6:10:18 PM PDT

It's interesting to watch the negativity and obnoxiousness of some bloggers and anonymous commenters while these layoffs have been going on. When things go bad you can really tell what people are made of.

• Don't lay people off one at a time, do it as a group. Don't spread layoffs over multiple rounds.
• Cutting salaries over headcount is generally not a good idea.
• Give severance even though you don't have to. Be as generous as you can.
• After the layoffs, get folks ready to kill it again.

Calacanis shovels page after page of boring details about P&L and office expenses. You know what word's not in there? "Sad." Boy Wonder's not going to spell it out, so I will: If layoffs don't get you as excited as that time you jumped out of an airplane, then realized too late what a lousy job you'd done of packing your own parachute and you were going to die now — heh, layoffs! Love 'em or go back to grad school.

(Photo by nikan_gr)

I wonder if he and Michael Arrington taught "how to fire half your staff" at TechCrunch 50 this year?

Silicon Alley Insider reports that a third of Mahalo's full-time staff was laid off; Calacanis, in a blog post — wait, we thought he stopped blogging — muddles the issue by saying Mahalo has 70 full-time and freelance staff. A former Mahalo insider, however, says the real full-time staff has dropped by roughly half, from 60 this summer to 30 before the layoffs. The Brooklyn-raised CEO is ever the artful dodger.