Jason Calacanis is a master storyteller. Like most writers, he needs an editor. Here's a summary remix of Calacanis's secret insider mail, sent a few hours after Mahalo's layoffs were expertly leaked to everyone but me, thanks pal.

Jason Calacanis took time out from his mailing list to blog about firing a baker's dozen of his Mahalo staff. The very same brilliant, hard-working, antifamily people he said he'd never compromise on. Today's featured commenter is sggrf, who wonders out loud on whether Calacanis might turn the episode into conference fodder:

Mahalo founder: "Tough times, hard decisions." Zillow founder: "Difficult times, difficult decisions." Seesmic founder: "Tough times. Tough decisions." The only thing easy in these times is what to headline your post about the employees you just laid off. Also, make sure to note that you are sad.

Bulldog aficionado Jason Calacanis recently predicted that a large number of Web 2.0 startups will end up on "life support." Could Mahalo, his so-called "human-powered search engine," be one of them? He has laid off 13 of the humans who power Mahalo, with plans to rehire some of them offshore in the Philippines. It's not clear how many staff members that leaves Mahalo with.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.

"We're liveblogging the world," funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis tweeted about Mahalo's new human-powered news feed on the search site's front door. Jason, help me out here: A couple weeks ago you bragged about forecasting the Startup Depression of 2008. Now you've added a powered-by-humans news feed to your product that looks like CNN crossed with Fark. How did you justify this to your investors in the face of a startup depression? Because from my experience, all English-language content looks the same to a VC. I'm not sure if I should ask when your funders will finally pull the plug on your two-bulldogs lifestyle, or if I'm just playing on the wrong team.

It's Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis's world, we just have the misfortune of living in it. The former Silicon Alley Reporter publisher decided to quit blogging, instead opting to send out his verbose fonts of wisdom as emails. Take his latest 2,948-word missive, "(The) Startup Depression" — claiming that anywhere from half to four in five startups will fail thanks to the current economic crisis (or at least, will blame their failure on the economy). Apparently Calacanis asked that the post be taken down. Because of a principled stand for intellectual property? Because SAI's publisher was getting the pageviews and Mahalo wasn't? Or because Calacanis can't take the heat in a public forum? The fight that broke out in the comments between Wallstrip creator Howard Lindzon, Blodget and serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer suggests the latter.

Excerpted from an email Jason Calacanis sent to fans, and later published on his ostensibly shuttered blog:

Reprinted from an email, because Jason Calacanis makes it impossible to otherwise link to.

We know that Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis likes to feed his pinup bulldogs Taurus and Fondue burgers from In-n-Out and Pinkberry froyo (to keep their coats glossy and brains brand-aware, we're assuming). Little did we know that he's also eating his own dog food. In a monstrous essay sent via telegraph email titled PR Strategies for Startups, he offers his tips on garnering free publicity by gaming the press. A lot of it is stuff you probably can't get away with unless you're already wealthy, have cute dogs, and are named Jason Calacanis.But in the section, "How to bond with a journalist," he suggests that "you can cut to the front of the line by spending just 30 minutes researching the journalist you're pitching." We're not sure what's creepier: (A) that Calacanis emailed the piece directly to me and very special contributor Paul Boutin, nagging us to post it, or (B) that his suggestions describe the duties of the minion he employs to monitor us.

I hope VCs are realistic about any search startup's chances against Google at this stage. Cuil's traffic withered shortly after launch. Another gang of Google graduates at The Mechanical Zoo have revealed scant details of their plans with the announcement of Aardvark. The short version: Rather than asking a search engine questions, you ask your friends instead. Other than that, the social-search-or-something product remains a cryptid. Sounds more like a rival to Yahoo Answers than Google search. "For information you can trust, a person is better than a webpage," promise Aardvark's handlers. Why an Aardvark, the bug-eating African mammal?Probably because it's the first animal listed in most dictionaries, implying there will be many more products to similarly anthropomorphize. Assuming the funds from the "mega-Series-A round" the company is looking to close doesn't run out first. According to the prehensile news nose of Kara Swisher, the valuation will be "larger than is typical at this stage in the game." Mahalo and Wikia leave me unconvinced that creating new tools to get help from friends on Web queries will ever make a dent in Google's search market share. If I wanted to ask my friends — even strangers — a question, I've got all sorts of social networks I rarely use like Twitter and Facebook. Email and IM work better, anyway. It's called the Lazyweb for a reason. Why make it harder? (Photo by MontageMan)

Our featured commenter, Robin Wauters, has one question for you about the latest spat between Mahalo's Jason Calacanis and Rocketboom's Aaron Baron:

In this corner, Andrew Baron, cofounder of hot videoblog mess Rocketboom, challenging Mahalo founder and incumbent blowhard champeen Jason Calacanis. Baron lands the first blow, citing Mahalo's "flat" traffic. Calacanis counters with some trash talk and then a body blow to Baron's privileged upbringing. Baron complains to the ref that the "trust-fund baby" charges were below the belt. Meanwhile, Calacanis argues with the judges that Baron shouldn't get the point on the Mahalo traffic jab. After the jump, the action continues.

Flaxen-locked funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis says Google has been a content company for a while now. With Knol, the Googlers plan to become the Internet's reference library rather than just its card catalog. I used the editorial equivalent of gzip to compress Calacanis's arguments down to 1/10 size.

The road to recovery from gambling addiction is a long one, but the first priority is admitting to yourself that you have a problem, which Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis did in his first email missive since quitting the blogosphere:

At the brand new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco last night, the team at European VC firm Wellington Partners celebrated the addition of an outpost in Palo Alto to their existing offices in London and Munich with a swell mixer. The hors d'oeuvres? Cheese gougères, tiny lamb chops, mushroom napoleons, Kobe beef sliders, croutons with creme fraiche, smoked salmon and caviar and a bite-sized tuna tartar, all washed down with French wine which topped $300 a bottle — which, as the joke went, "Is like, what, 20 euros?" Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis explained that for European private equity investors, the American market offers a double-dip:

No, we did not head down to sleepy Palo Alto for the Search SIG meeting featuring small-time players like Mahalo, Wikia and Microsoft, but Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis seems to wish we did. But why bother going when we can get juicy quotes about Jimmy Wales, who founded for-profit Wikia after failing to figure out how to milk Wikipedia for cash from our home office? Those who tuned into Calacanis's Ustream live video channel got juicy quotes like "Guy's got an ethics problem" and "It's naive to think encyclopedias have anything to do with search"? while bemused Wikia representative Jeremie Miller Nick Sullivan sat on the panel. (Wales didn't even show up) You stay classy, Jason! After the jump, a firsthand report from our tipster, including more of Calacanis's wit and wisdom.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident: Wikipedia's Tyranny of the Mob sucks. Every time I run an item about Jimmy Wales, my page gets hacked. So what about Jason Calacanis's pursuit of happiness over at Mahalo? Former Uncov blogger and army of one Ted Dziuba has posted a step-by-step pictorial guide to practicing your First Amendment rights using the search index's new open editorial system. Try this on Wikipedia, and someone from the armed and unregulated Militia of Truth will likely kill your edits on sight. But on Mahalo, only Calacanis's paid mercenaries will bother to fix pages. At $10 an hour, there's no way they'll be able to keep up. Let freedom ring!

If, like me, you've been tricked by super-cute bulldogs into trying Jason Calacanis's Mahalo search engine, you've probably been disappointed by some of Mahalo's results pages. Calacanis has a new message for frustrated users: Fix it yourself. Mahalo now allows anonymous users — tracked by their IP addresses, same as Wikipedia — to edit any guide page. If there's no page for a specific keyword yet, you can create one without a member account. Jason, babe, some cheap advice: Your noncompetitors at the nearly forgotten Citizendium are hosting their monthly Write-a-thon today. How about a Mahalo-a-thon? Every Friday? I'm 100 percent sure you can throw a better party.

Before creating the world's most comprehensive list of videogame cheats, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis worked at AOL under then-CEO Jon Miller. Calacanis joined AOL only after it bought Weblogs Inc. from him for $25 million and since Miller led that acquisition, eventually invested in Mahalo and now sits on the company's board, Calacanis is naturally a little biased in his feelings toward Miller, whom Calacanis considers a mentor. Still, when we heard talk of Miller as a contender to be Yahoo's next CEO, we figured Calacanis's opinions would at least be entertainingly biased. Our email exchange:

Meghan Asha has been tied to notoriously workaholic TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington over the last few months. But could she be tiring of a beau with no work-life balance?