PC World editor Harry McCracken has resigned from that publication after its new CEO spiked a story about Apple mogul Steve Jobs. According to Wired, CEO Colin Crawford "also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers." The future of magazines is here! And it looks just like the future of the internet, not unexpectedly. Yesterday, Gawker's Evil Ad Overlord Chris Batty killed our hilarious list of the ten most annoying things about Jason Calacanis and told us we'd better start talking up those really nice Diesel Denim Gallery jeans which are available at a Diesel store near you right now or we'd be out on our ass. Because we're virtue-shy wusses, we sucked it up, but it's nice to see that some people still have integrity.

NICK DOUGLAS — It's one thing to be your own #1 fan. But people like bloggers Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Jason Calacanis are their own worshippers. Guy is such a consummate self-evangelist that he's practically his own pope. Seth's number one product is himself. Jason thinks he's Ari Gold from Entourage. How do they pull this off, and how do some wannabes fail to build their own cults of self?

Dear Blogger,

Twitter binging comes with a price, as Jason Calacanis discovered Sunday. The Weblogs Inc co-founder, now a Sequoia Capital "entrepreneur in action," racked up a $236.70 bill on his T-Mobile plan for having the chatty "microblogging" service send 2,367 status messages to his cellphone. Maybe there's a business opportunity here for Evan Williams' Twitter — teaming up with T-Mobile to reach the market of savvy entrepreneurs who have trouble choosing the right cellphone plan. The ultimate irony? Calacanis couldn't stop himself from posting to Twitter about it. Sunday he returned to the service to report one more update to his status. "Crushed by twitter bill." DC

More details on the major podcasting-video venture from Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban. In addition to the much-discussed Los Angeles studio space, rumor has it there will also be a New York franchise, run in partnership with an as yet unnamed media entity. This location would allow for block closings and live concerts, recorded for release both on Cuban's HDNet and (at lower quality) other online venues. The sets will be constructed around built-in advertising as a way to defray production costs and allow for free distribution under the auspices of Creative Commons. Looking forward to that first off-the-hook podcast block party.

Whatever our differences with Jason Calacanis, we're foursquare on his side when it comes to the ickiness of Pay Per Post. PPP's Ted Murphy has been on a tear vs. Calacanis lately as part of a continuing campaign to prove the worthiness of PPP as a business. Certainly Murphy must be making money, but that doesn't make his business any less off-putting. The problem with PPP isn't that it's not effective, assuming it is effective versus other kinds of product promotion. The problem is that it's sleazy manipulation, pure and simple.

You either recognize that sleaze for what it is, or you don't. Too many PPP critics try to engage it on the merits of disclosing commercial relationships, and to Murphy's credit, he's quick to point out endless examples of gray-area shillwork by other bloggers. But the elemental success of the PPP model stands or falls on the ability of its bloggers to gloss over the fact that their posts are paid advertising. Not outirght deception, or overt manipulation. It's just subtle word-of-mouth-ish goodness that appeals based on its amateur, unpolished presentation. PPP is not designed to reach smart, savvy consumers. It's designed to reach large masses of indiscriminate blog readers on the cheap ... people who reflexively avoid obvious advertising, but who are easily drawn in by a regular-joe blogger.

Murphy's love of his "transparency" initiatives — such as the laughable "disclosure badges," which are in fact widgets for selling yet more advertising — should be further proof that the concept of disclosure as inoculation against impropriety is dead as a doornail. All the disclosure in the world won't justify the fact that Hewlett-Packard paid a woman to write their logo on her face. If you don't recoil from that, then you're not going to object to anything else PPP does — or anything they pay anyone else to do.

Or at least, their money is united in podcast-love. Calacanis is assembling not just a cute pied-à-terre for his personal podcasts, but rather a full-fledged production studio — part of a considerable venture that has billion-boy Mark Cuban involved. Calacanis's old pal CK Sample is even helping with the tech staffup. According to a tipster, the studio is

Techcrunch's Mike Arrington — who has never claimed to be a "golden fountain of objectivity" — recently partnered with Jason Calacanis to launch the Techcrunch20 demo conference. The idea is to break out of the paid-demo conference mold and give space to startups based purely on merit. However, there's no reason to throw the cash-baby out with the payola-bathwater for other events.The Supernova conference — produced by the Wharton School — also selects its 12 Techcrunch-sponsored "Connected Innovators" based on merit. Of course, the winners must be prepared to cough up $5,000 in order to accept the honor and make their presentation; that's in addition to the $2,000+ conference fee, though if you're so inclined, you can bundle your $5K fee in with some slick conference sponsorships for yet more money. Note that winners get three (presumably laudatory) posts on Techcrunch as part of the deal, in addition to related conference coverage. None of this is improper or even unusual as far as conferences go. If nothing else, it illustrates that the charitable instincts of the Techcrunch20 event will not be copied elsewhere unless some serious insta-cash blows out of the demos at the freebie conference.

A few weeks back, we IMterviewed Weblogs Inc. founder and Sequoia entrepreneur Jason Calacanis egarding his newest projects. When his planned venture was likened to taking on Henry Copeland at Blogads, Calacanis replied, "That's like Michael Jordan going after a 12-year old in a game of 1-on-1." (Which Jordan would totally do; he's notoriously cruel.) Copeland didn't take kindly to being likened to a 12-year-old, though.

In response to the broadside, Copeland posted a laundry list of reasons why Blogads is better than Weblogs ever was. In closing, he comes up with 10-1 odds for Jordan vs. The Kid, and wagers $10,000 of his money versus $100,000 from Calacanis that Blogads' "2006 totals for net blogger earnings" were better than Weblogs'. 1,000 to 1 odds that Calacanis will respond at all; 100,000 to 1 that he takes the bet, considering that he no longer need even get out of bed for anything as paltry as Copeland's $10,000.

It's the usual fluffery in this BusinessWeek love note to John Battelle and his Federated Media, including the literal money shot: "Last year, [FM] sold more than $10 million in advertising for about 90 Web sites. This year, Battelle says it is on track to turn a profit and increase sales fivefold." Check the counter-quote from none other than Jason Calacanis, who dislikes the idea of not owning the blogs in the network: "The second you build your client's business past $500,000 a year, they hire their own sales force." Doesn't leave a lot of room to maneuver with recently acquired FM client Ask a Ninja, reputedly brought aboard with a $300,000 guarantee. That's not the best thing about this article, though.

NICK DOUGLAS — Good deals are obvious. Great deals are not. News Corp's $580-million purchase of MySpace was "Murdoch's Folly" no more when Google paid $900 million to power MySpace search. In that spirit, here are the top nine business moves from 2006 that don't make sense — at first. Below, the video that started Deal #1.

• Guy who told Murdoch to buy MySpace quits. [Guardian]
  

The New York vlogger from 1938 Media (the one who last week called TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington an ass for three minutes while lying in bed) now dresses up like an infant to lampoon AOL exec Jason Calacanis, head of Netscape.com and Weblogs, Inc.

The founders of the Weblogs Inc. Network sold their Blogsmith blogging platform to AOL (who bought WIN in 2005) last week, according to founder Jason Calacanis. Sounds like AOL paid $4-5 million. The deal wasn't public until now.

You can disdain the following jerks, sellouts, and creeps who made the world worse this weekend — but don't let anyone know you're really just jealous.

I was cruising youTube looking for clips of Jason Calacanis' keynote speech today at the Blog Business Summit. Some of the blogs covering the talk had mentioned Jason was filmed and hoped it would be posted online in the near future. I didn't find JC at the BBS, I found something much better, 1938 Media going off on Netscape's Jason Calacanis, Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis collectively call them both a-holes for going after PayPerPost. I don't know who 1938 Media is, but he's my new hero.

Flack blog Pro PR and a host of other blogs cover Jason 'J.C.' Calacanis' keynote speech at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle Washington. In the talk, Jason discusses what it takes to become a famous blogger:

The world's biggest Internet service provider keeps getting smaller, this week announcing that offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona will close in December and 1400 workers will lose their jobs. AOL will also sell its 400-person Ogden, Utah call center, with no guarantee that those employees will keep their jobs.

A reader identified the podcaster to whom famously cheeky AOL exec Jason Calacanis said at a recent podcasting expo, "You're podcasting? Let me give you some good advice, no one wants to hear you talk." Turns out it's the cutie to the left, Olga Timakova, spokesmodel for the DigitalSlobPod podcast. So here's the inevitable unfair question:

"You're podcasting? Let me give you some good advice, no one wants to hear you talk ..." That, according to blogger Chris Heuer, is what AOL exec Jason Calacanis told the young lady pictured above at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo.