Another blogosphere dust-up and in the middle of the week nonetheless! This one involves everyone’s favorite champion of “Web 2.0″ marketing, Jason Calacanis and the man behind Rocketboom, Andrew Baron. What’s the topic of interest? If you haven’t guessed yet, it’s Mahalo.

As The Blogosphere Turns

Before I begin, let me say that I believe that Mahalo is a decent idea as long as you see it for what it is — a moderated news Wiki, not a “search engine.” The problem with Mahalo is that you can’t search for the kind of obscure stuff that people really need help finding out about. A query for “graph theory,” for example, sends me straight to the Google results page and I suspect it always will.

Mahalo does, however, provide a really good access point for topical news and saves you a few clicks if your major concern of the day is the big, fat head of web search.

That being said, I am not too sure what to make of Andrew Baron’s polemic. Normally I would pass this off as Techmeme link bait, but I think it might be something more interesting. Something that you can see clearly when you take some time to review the comments.

More and more I am seeing a blogosphere where publishers with clout are using their readers to drive their agenda. If this sounds familiar, it should — it’s one of the reasons why people ran to blogging to begin with. Here is the play by play.

• Andrew claims Mahalo is a SEO/Advertising honeypot.
• Jason claims that Andrew is upset at him for trying to steal away some of Andrew’s talent away for the Mahalo Daily vlog.
• Andrew’s readers form a block against Jason
• Jason’s friends from around the blogosphere ride in to defend him.

After all this, it doesn’t look like we ever really explored the initial question — whether Mahalo provides real value and for who (a really interesting subject to explore). I don’t think that in this context either of these men were trying to act as journalists, but I do see that underlying politics and personal gripes turned an interesting discussion into a filler piece for Valleywag.

Why is this bad?

It’s not really that terrible, but it raises the question as to why “citizen media” exists. I have a hard time thinking of bloggers as journalists because it seems like more and more we behave like B-List celebrities. While many, many a blogger tries hard to stay out of the politics; lots of us go out of our way to embrace the chaos.

It has to be partly human nature but also it has to do with the fact that so many people use blogging as a tool to market their personal brands and there is nothing like a good soap opera to get your name passed around.

Web 2.0 Roundup

What’s the take away here?

Maybe it’s once again time to audit the state of the blogosphere. What do we think we are and what have we actually become. If I were taking bets, I would say that most of us are much more like cable television personalities looking to occasionally inform but mostly entertain than serious journalists in search of truth in a world filled with old media that, “just doesn’t understand.” This wouldn’t be so bad if we would just admit to it.

What do you think?

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