Loren Feldman of 1938 Media sucking up to Jason Calacanis on his latest podcast: "If ...um... Mahalo went away, people would freak! If Facebook went away, I don't know if people would freak." [Calacaniscast]

Blogs continue to sell — but blog valuations are staying modest. Discovery Communications, the cable-and-online media company, has bought enviro blog TreeHugger for a reported $10 million. With nearly 2 million unique visitors, that means Discovery paid a very modest $5 per "eyeball" — the unpleasant online-advertising slang for a reader. Contrast that to the bubbly hopes of GigaOm's Om Malik back in 2005, when he wrote about the "return of monetized eyeballs" for Business 2.0. (Full disclosure: I helped him crunch the numbers for that story.)

It's almost — almost, but not quite — enough to make us want to stop picking on him. Jason Calacanis has gotten sick, declared Facebook bankruptcy in the face of 150 pending friend requests, and turned off comments on his blog. He even expresses envy for the invite-only comments system that Nick Denton, his archnemesis and Valleywag emeritus, whipped up for his Gawker Media blogs, Valleywag included. When Calacanis thinks Denton is doing something right, you know he's really at the end of his rope. Or maybe it's just the antibiotics talking.

What on earth could bring together supposed mortal enemies Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis? Why, Om Malik, of course. Rose is the founder of Digg, and Calacanis, the blowhard entrepreneur who created a Digg clone when he was an executive at AOL. But love has conquered all that. First, there's Malik, the cuddly tech blogger, a friend to all. And, perhaps more importantly, there's Malik's stunning cohost for his new Internet TV show, "The GigaOm Show." Lawyer-turned-videoblogger Joyce Kim, you see, is Calacanis's sister-in-law. Family trumps all. The four were among the stars at a launch party that Revision3, Rose's online-video company, threw for Malik and Kim Wednesday night in the tower of San Francisco's de Young Museum. (Revision3 is producing and distributing the show.) New Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback looks like a weatherman and talks extremely loudly. (My boss has nicknamed him "Jumpin' Jim Louderback.") After the jump, a gallery of photos from the glitzy affair.

Jason Calacanis, the former AOL executive, just posted the following on Twitter:

If you can't be Larry Page and Sergey Brin, why not try being Martha Stewart? That's Jason Calacanis's new plan. (We think he'd look absolutely fetching in an apron, too.) Less than two months after he launched his search engine, Calacanis has shifted strategies, emphasizing how-to content on the so-called "human powered search engine."

Hate to say it, but Jason Calacanis had it right: NYT gadget reviewer David Pogue's "iPhone: The Musical" was a trite, derivative, and boring piece of Apple propaganda. But a group of San Francisco webheads have come up with a pitch-perfect take on the iPhone phenomenon. Behold the glory that is "Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?" — and after the jump, my take on why this spoof gets it right while Pogue's flopped.

NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes is reporting that recently departed PC Magazine editor Jim Louderback will become CEO at video site Revision3, replacing the Sun Valley-bound Jay Adelson. Also, video personality Veronica Belmont has left troubled CNET to create video for Jason Calacanis's Mahalo. [NewTeeVee]

Jeremy Liew, venture capitalist, on funding your startup: Raise just as much as you need, preferably at a low valuation. Entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Jason Calacanis: Take the money and run. Can you tell who buys startups and who sells them?

Say what you like about Jason Calacanis: At least the bulldog-like entrepreneur isn't afraid to bite the hand that feeds him. Lightly. Without teeth. Calacanis accuses venture capitalist Roelof Botha and his colleagues of not being telegenic, a fact captured by AllThingsD.com's Kara Swisher in her video we linked to yesterday. But telegenic or not, Sequoia is the hot venture capital firm of the moment, which is why entrepreneurs should study, intently, the brief glimpse of Sequoia's inner sanctum Swisher filmed. Why? So that when you go to pitch your startup, you can walk in acting like you've seen it all before. Because you have. Required viewing, after the jump.

Mahalo, Jason Calacanis's new search-engine venture, uses Google's AdSense system to target ads to its content. But in placing the ads, Calacanis got a bit too chummy for Google's comfort. Mahalo's website cheerily informs users that the ads that appear are placed by "Our Friends at Google." Oh, really? We asked Google if the search engine was really best-friends-forever with Calacanis, or what. Here's what we heard back from Jason's supposed friends.

Lolcats vs. Jason Calacanis. "How can you call yourself a search engine when you're getting beat by cats with bad grammar?" [uncov]

Jason Calacanis' target for today is Seth Godin's Squidoo. Whether or not Squidoo is being gamed by search engine optimizers (SEOs), the puritanical founder of the human search engine Mahalo has a problem with porn. Apparently porn has no place on the web, and search tools should not index the dirty, dirty content. Or is Calacanis just upset that a search on Mahalo for "xxx" results in entries for the Dallas Cowboys, Michael Irvin, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Vin Diesel, and "porn" yields entries for churros, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, Jenna Jameson, and Tera Patrick? If Squidoo is being gamed by SEOs, maybe Mahalo could use a little gaming to shore up the relevancy of these presumably popular search terms.

James "Jimmy" Wales, founder of the non-profit, online encyclopedia Wikipedia and not yet developed, commercial search engine Wikia, exchanged barbs with Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. and the recent human search engine Mahalo, over the holiday on the Wikia mailing lists. Wales says that, since it isn't free, Calacanis' Mahalo "is just not that interesting. I mean, I am sure it is lovely and all, but I really don't care about it." Calacanis, not one to shy from a fight, questions Wales' accuracy, memory, ability to hold his liquor, and apparent ambivalence. Calacanis, a constant self-promoter in need of publicity for Mahalo, and Wales, an idealist who can dismiss commercial concerns in favor of an academic debate, both benefit.

No one should be surprised that Jason Calacanis has taken issue with my analysis of the paltry traffic to his new search engine, Mahalo. Ever the promoter, Calacanis jumped right into the comments. But I am a bit disappointed that this is the best spin he could come up with: "Being in the top 20,000 on Alexa rank is a darn good for a one month old site." Really, dude, you're better. Let's review this list of Web pages which outscore Mahalo on Alexa:

TechCrunch20, the upcoming conference planned by blogging blowhards Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington, now comes complete with $50,000 in prize money for the startup judged, like a prized poodle, to be the "Best in Show." [TechCrunch]

In Latin, "ave atque vale" means "hello and goodbye." But in Hawaiian, the same word, "aloha," means both. How convenient for Mahalo, the Hawaiian-named search engine from Jason Calacanis. Calacanis is a ceaseless self-promoter in person, on his blog, on Twitter, and no doubt in mediums yet to be invented. But all his hard-charging Brooklyn ways have yet to bring Mahalo actual users. After the jump, a look at Mahalo's vanishingly small traffic.

How Jason Calacanis became the Richard Simmons of the blogosphere. [LA Times]

Tubby Internet dynamo Jason Calacanis is the Oprah of the fatblogging revolution. [LAT]

NICK DOUGLAS — "Life is grand," says Jason Calacanis in his new profile on StumbleUpon, but he chose the saddest-looking headshot he could find. Maybe it's a hint that things aren't going as well as planned for the serial entrepreneur's latest startup, Mahalo. Another hint could be that Jason's first three links for StumbleUpon (a site where users share great web pages, sometimes causing a cascade of visitors to one site like the "Digg effect"). All his "great finds" link to pages on Mahalo — a pretty sorry way to drive traffic to one's own site. But I can't get over the mopey profile photo. As a friend said, "It's the idea of him posing to look sad — and that it probably took dozens of shots to get the right sad one."