Santa Monica-based Mahalo, the search and news site run by Jason Calacanis, has cut 10 percent of the firm's staff, Calacanis said in a post on his blog Wednesday. Mahalo is venture backed by Burda Digital Ventures, CBS, News Corp., Calacanis said that the moves were due to a "challenging economic environment." According to Calacanis, the firm is "fairly certain" that advertising for the next two years will be "severely depressed."

SMCLA ( Social Media Club Los Angeles ) will be hosted tonight at the Mahalo offices in Santa Monica. Pictures and videos from newsworthy events make it to the web via mobile phones and hand held devices and first hand accounts are micro blogged in 140 characters or less before any traditional news outlet is able to cover the story. Mahalo Office 902 They have invited a writer from the LA Times, an editor from LAist, and a partner from Real Poiltech to discuss  ”Citizen Journalism: Social Media’s Affect on How News is Reported and Consumed”. This panel

Santa Monica-based Mahalo , the human-powered search engine run by Jason Calacanis, is in the spotlight again, this time for putting a price on being a top Twitter user. According to Mahalo head Calacanis, he is offering the micro blogging service $500,000, to have Mahalo's new Answers service featured as a "suggested user" for three years. Mahalo Answers is Mahalo's question and answer Calacanis had originally offered $250k to Twitter for the position, saying that his offer was meant to "get the attention of Twitter CEO Evan Williams, founder Jack Dorsey" along with investors Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet.

High profile entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, CEO of Los Angeles-based Mahalo , emailed an impassioned note to his mailing list Thursday, which he also posted to his personal blog, detailing how one of the firm's employees has just been sentenced to 48 months in jail for computer hacking. Calacanis said that Mahalo has a "rigorous" hiring process, but that the firm failed to do a "simple Google search" which would have revealed the fact that Schiefer had been convicted of hacking. According to the FBI indictment, the employee, John Scheifer, infected 250,000 computers with malware to create a "botnet"--a network of hacked computers used to steal account data.

The announcement follows the  heart attack of another Silicon Valley blogger Om Malik last year , and closer to home, the abandoning of blogging by Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis –who when he quit last year said “…Today, the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it.” Tags: Blog TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington — probably the most watched technology blogger in the world — said this morning that he’s going on hiatus for the month of February, in the face of death threats, a recent event where someone spat on him, and because he “can’t say my job is fun any more.”

Jason Calacanis , CEO of Santa Monica-based Internet search site Mahalo , has signed on several angels for his new angel group, the Open Angel Forum - Los Angeles . Calacanis--who started the group as an outgrowth of his crusade against pay-to-pitch angel groups like The Keiretsu Forum--said in his blog today that he has signed up Matt Coffin , Sky Dayton , and Bill Woodward as members of his group. Tags: Coffin is the founder of LowerMyBills, Dayton is the founder of Earthlink, and Woodward is a venture capitalist at Anthem Venture Partners. Calacanis launched what he called

Local News Online & More Valuable User Generated Content The user generated content on MySpace is user profiles, updates, blogs and pictures.  This could also be done by leveraging a partnership (or buyout) of a site like Mahalo . • Local I wouldn’t bet against MySpace . They attract over 70 million people a month (just in the US), and by most accounts are still one of the 10 most popular sites in the world.

This is the beginning of a content community that collects and organizes the best content from blogs and web sites. So here's the Hot List for 1/1/2009 - 1/15/2009 Top 5 Posts The 7 Ways to Get Traffic on the Web Why You Need To Lead A Tribe - Seth Godin LA Gets Dugg, Hammered, Screwed How To Get The World Excited About Your Business –The James Siminoff Interview Viral analytics and metrics - go viral young startup Top 20 Keywords SEO Metrics Marketing Social Media Alelo Google Yahoo Mahalo MySpace Tech Coast Angels

You can also catch her on CBSNEWS.COM bringing you the best in social trends and pop culture on her blog “On The Scene”, and as a correspondent on The Tomorrow Show with Mo Rocca. But in the meantime, start your blog, your personality-driven site.  Find Start blogging consistently - maybe not everyday.  Make What I admire about Shira Lazar is that she's too much of a go-getter to wait for the perfect TV gig to come to her. I've watched her build her reputation and fan-base using new media tools like Qik, Wordpress and Twitter.

Founder and CEO of Mahalo , Jason Calacanis is the original community CEO, or as we like to say OGSocial. From Twitter, to podcasts, to his own blog, Jason has done it all. Blog: 50,000 Monthly Readers ( link ) Blog: 15,000 Monthly Readers ( link ) It’s interesting (to me at least) the vast audiences that tech founders are able to assemble. Through their own products and others, they manage to build massive communities that in many cases, hang on their every word tweet.