I have never been more grateful to Jason Calacanis. The prickly Internet entrepreneur disinvited me, you see, from TechCrunch40, the conference opening today in San Francisco that he organized with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. And thereby saved me from a long nap at the Sheraton Palace. The conference was originally supposed to highlight 20 companies, but Arrington and Calacanis couldn't decide on just 20, so they "doubled down" and expanded the list to 40, ostensibly because all the companies were so great. But then we all saw the list last night. I'd considered jumping off my red-eye flight and heading to the Sheraton Palace — indeed, friends begged me to just show up and see what happened. But going by the list of startups presenting there — Zivity? Orgoo? — I'm just as content to get your reports and post the best of them.

Jason Calacanis, frenemy of Valleywag's parent company and co-organizer of an event with TechCrunch (the TechCrunch 40), invited me to the event's Facebook group. Upon joining, I asked, "This means I'm in free, right?" Jason's reply: "sorry, no Valleywag people at the event. You guys are just too hated! :-)" Aw Jason, I emoticon you too!

AOL's Digg clone, formerly branded as Netscape and already pronounced dead, will be rebranded as Propeller. The announcement came from Tom Drapeau, the head of AOL's Netscape division since Jason Calacanis's brief tenure. Muhammed Saleem, a Propeller editor né Netscape Scout, thinks technology sites should be eating their hats for the grave predictions. Maybe the site would have had a chance at life and competed with Digg, the social news site, if it had launched with original branding instead of misusing the name of the already-dead Netscape. But AOL angered and turned off a loyal community when, under Calacanis, it killed the original Netscape and, after Calacanis's jealous pursuit of Kevin Rose, its own Digg clone — even if the sites ignominiously remain on life support and AOL refuses to accept that its time to pull the plug.

Tom Drapeau, the current head of Netscape at AOL, is finally admitting that Jason Calacanis's jealous attempt to clone Kevin Rose's Digg was a failure. Sort of. Calacanis, who left AOL earlier this year to launch Mahalo, an also-ran Web directory, had hoped to persuade Netscape's loyal but dwindling base of users to embrace Digg's social-news model, where users submit headlines and vote on them to determine their ranking on the site. Drapeau confirms what TechCrunch predicted weeks ago — after initially denying it: Users do not want the Netscape brand associated with Calacanis's social-news experiment. But Drapeau continues to stubbornly insist that Netscapers "remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users." They just don't know when the site will be available, what it will be called, or what they'll do with it.

The crew from Uncov, the sarcastic self-styled anti-TechCrunch, wants to attend TechCrunch20. That, of course, is the conference where TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington will bless us with 20 demonstrations of the hottest new startups. Uncov's editors say they want to ask the hard questions we all suspect won't be posed to Arrington's handpicked favorites. But attendance, alas, isn't free. Each ticket costs $2,495. So the "bunch of poor startup founders who write a marginally popular blog that doesn't have any advertising on it" are having a hard time making ends meet. If you don't want Uncov absent at the TechCrunch20 "jerkoff," you can make a donation. So far, they have raised a whopping $185! So they need your support.

Jason Calacanis in the first Read/WriteTalk interview with Sean Ammirati: "I always look at entrepreneurs as samurai. It's a lonely pursuit at times and basically your life is to fight. And you get done with one fight. You clean the blood off your sword. You put it away. You walk 10 miles to another village. And then you got to clean up that village. A couple of people got to lose their arms. And then you clean the blood off your sword. You have a cup of tea and some rice. And then you walk to the next village. That's the metaphor I work under which is it's a war and you have to just be stoic. And you have to fight hard." What would executives do without the well-worn samurai metaphor to rationalize their coldblooded, mercenary behavior? [Read/WriteTalk]

Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft evangelist and die-hard PodTech videoblogger, has ended his brief departure from the Web. Clearly he thinks he's "adding value" with his bold theory that "Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years." You won't be able to read his theory, of course, since he has, tiresomely, recorded it on video. But you can see the sincerity in his eyes, hear it in his voice, and watch him pull out the whiteboard and three, count 'em: three, colored markers! In truth, he's just revealing what he has always been: a confused evangelist who doesn't understand the underlying technology, doesn't have his facts straight, and can't keep his story consistent. But, boy, is he enthusiastic about it! Why? I think he's lobbying for his next job.

Jason Calacanis, the blowhard blogger, has called spammers and SEOs "slime buckets," "snake oil salesman," and "low-class idiots." He has now joined them, however. Calacanis has been flooding inboxes with unsolicited spam advertising his company's Mahalo Follow software, a browser extension. And here we thought Mahalo was supposed to combat spam, not produce it. Reports are coming in across the Web that people who have never used Mahalo nor requested information about Mahalo are receiving spam from Calacanis. "Apparently 'Mahalo' is Hawaiian for 'douchebag,'" says one irate spam recipient. If you've received the message, do what a responsible Internet citizen like Jason Calacanis would do: report the abusive spam and delete it.

Inc. magazine is digging into the mystery of who's running TheFunded.com, a website which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists. Writer Max Chafkin makes four guesses: Gawker Media publisher and Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton; Digg founder Kevin Rose; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and blog blowhard Jason Calacanis. Asked by Chafkin, Calacanis denied being "Ted," the mysterious man behind the site. A curious stance, since until recently, Calacanis was eagerly attempting to take credit for TheFunded.com. Never one for subtlety, he told friends of his plan to leak a rumor to Valleywag that he was behind the site. Alas, no, Jason: You only wish you were clever enough to come up with an idea like TheFunded.com.

It was all in good fun, I thought, to tease my former boss Jason Pontin, now editor of MIT's Technology Review, about using Facebook, of all things, to hunt for interesting startup ideas. But the well-meant mockery soon uncovered a deeper issue: My friend misunderstands how one is meant to use Facebook. Pontin, ever the technoliteralist, takes Facebook at its word, thinking of it as a tool to replicate real-world relationships. He misses the real use that self-promoters like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have discovered: Spamming the less-important people who have volunteered to be your "friends" — people who are really just fans, to whom you have no meaningful relationship.

Remember Fast Company? The print-magazine relic of the last boom is, surprisingly, still around, and still spilling ink monthly on the unlikeliest of subjects. Take, for example, its profile of Jason Calacanis, the serial entrepreneur and blog blowhard, and Mahalo, his bravado-powered search engine. The writer, Adam Penenberg, is relatively evenhanded in his coverage of the man, lauding his "transparency" while noting his "predatory" tendencies. But he falls short in his analysis of Calacanis's new company, which is trying to hand-build pages of search results for popular subjects. Even with help from Calacanis, Penenberg failed to ask any tough questions about Mahalo.

Purchase an iPhone and experiencing problems? Have no fear, Mahalo is here! Jason Calacanis's blowhard-powered search engine has handcrafted a results page specifically for your "iPhone problems." Mahalo claims to build "organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results" that "only include great links" with the best at the top using trusted "guides to make judgment calls based on what's in the best interest of our users." Certainly, a site that curates only the most authoritative links, according to Calacanis, can provide the answers to your questions about the most highly covered device in tech history. Well, no, it can't. But it does answer the question of why Mahalo is sure to fail.

Through her Demo conference, Chris Shipley strands some of the most important people in tech together in the desert and forces them to pay attention to strange new ideas. It's like Burning Man without the playa dust and with much fancier drinks, or so I'm told. The experience is apparently scarring enough to bond people for life, judging by the palsy-walsy crowd of past Demo participants and guests who crowded into Palo Alto's Zibibbo restaurant Tuesday night to mingle and mix with other "alumni."

Gnomedex, the Chris Pirillo-organized geekathon that took place over the weekend, claims to "unlock the attendee's spirit." Instead, the highlight of the event was the opening of a giant can of whoopass. Relentless self-promoter Jason Calacanis and blather-prone blogfather Dave Winer locked horns, and it wasn't pretty. Calacanis's presentation, unsuprisingly, was an infomercial for his latest venture, the human-powered search engine Mahalo. A few attendees started to heckle Calacanis, and Winer jumped in with the proclamation, "You're spamming us!" The presentation continued but led to a one-on-one berating, a weekend blogfight, the dissolution of a "friendship", and Winer withdrawing from Calacanis's TechCrunch20 startup conference. Winer's offended by Calacanis's self-promotion, Calacanis by Winer's lack of manners; but what really cheeses me off is their rank amateurism when it comes to heckling.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily. But a society of denial-ridden necrophiliacs hardly makes for a compelling audience. When AOL purchased Netscape in 1998, it did everything imaginable to keep the brand alive — and everything imaginable to kill it. It forced the worst features of AOL onto Netscape and migrated the best features of Netscape to AOL — not that it helped either. And Jason Calacanis's brief tenure at AOL? That dirt-grubbing graverobber just made things worse, and then left for greener pastures.

When Jason Calacanis finds a bully — other than the one he looks at every morning in the mirror, that is — his Brooklyn streetfighting instincts kick in. That's why he's going after Aftervote so hard. His response to a review declaring Aftervote "pimp" and superior to Calacanis' Mahalo? He Twittered that he has "inside info" that they'll be shut down for being "illegal." Of course, Dave Naylor, noted search-engine "optimizer" and the man behind Aftervote, did start the fight when he declared on his blog: "Aftervote will end Mahalo." What's really behind the fight and some choice quotes from the scrap, after the jump.

Entrepreneurs, how stupid does Jason Calacanis think you are? Pretty stupid, apparently. We recently pointed out how he and partner Michael Arrington were going back on their word by charging startups $1,247.50 to demo at TechCrunch20. Now, Calacanis has been going around claiming that the DemoPit program "[b]asically this wipes out any profit we would have from selling those slots." Nonsense. It's hard to know where to start in debunking this notion, but let's do it by the numbers.

When Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington launched their startup conference, TechCrunch20, they promised to change the slimy business of launching new companies at high-priced shindigs. For the companies chosen to present their products, be no cost to pitch or attend, unlike other high-profile startup bashes. Now, though, he's figured out how to solve two problems at once: Bump up flagging ticket sales and charge startups for the privilege of showing their wares. It's so ingenious, so hypocritical, and so brazen, it could only be conceived by Michael Arrington. Here's the plan.

Jason Calacanis, in search of a full-fledged strategy for his flailing "human search engine" Mahalo, wants you to work for him. For free. The wealthy Internet tycoon is using Linkedin to ask: "Lots of discussion as to the value of Facebook for startups.... wondering, how would you market Mahalo on Facebook?" Calacanis's Facebook bankruptcy has left the Internet millionaire downright poor — in ideas about how to use social networks, at any rate. Our favorite answer, after the jump.

Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose, interviewed together on the second episode of the GigaOm Show? Of course, the "fur would fly" — or so hosts Om Malik and Joyce Kim promised. Despite recent photographic evidence of a peace accord, Calacanis did, after all, try to undercut Kevin Rose's Digg social-news site with a revamped Netscape during his short tenure at AOL. So, did the claws come out?