Everyone assumes Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton personally pulls the puppet strings at Valleywag, but since I was hired last year, I've reported to Robischon, a friend I've known since we were both at Time. Damn: This means Denton actually is personally pulling the puppet strings now, doesn't it? I'm in so much trouble. But not as much trouble as Scoble: "I'm excited to be getting back into day-to-day editorial, and building something new," Robischon writes. Translation: Scoble will have to start making sense.

Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user is, has adopted the "milliscoble" as a metric. One-thousandth of Scoble's average daily output on the 140-character-update service equals one milliscoble. By his own standard, Scoble has been falling behind; in the past 100 days, he's been running 32 percent below the 1,000-milliscoble mark. If it falls to zero, will he suddenly be three times as productive in real life? Nah. It will just mean he's shifted his timewasting entirely to FriendFeed.

Most of the cuts are hitting Mansueto Digital, the company's Web arm, previously the fiefdom of executive Ed Sussman. Sussman is leaving the company, and control of Fastcompany.com is now being handed to the magazine's editor, Bob Safian; traffic had fallen by about half on Sussman's watch, while rivals like Wired saw visits to their websites grow quickly. Robert Scoble, the self-obsessed managing director of Fastcompany.tv, will still be employed as of Monday, though he now reports to Safian. Darn!

Crispin sort of exists because of the revolution in desktop publishing that the Mac brought about. You could be a small shop and compete against Madison Avenue for the first time because all the tools were in your computer.

Sacks then asked if CP&B plans to force employees off their Macs now that it's Microsoft's agency. Rob Reilly, Bogusky's executive on the Microsoft account, answered: "It's not a matter of forcing people. It's getting them to want to use it. If you can't, you're not going to do great advertising."

Yes, I've been anti-ads in the past. I agree with Dave Winer that more money can be made around the blog than with it. Fast Company wanted to try it so we're going to try it. I've never needed to put ads up in the past.

Meanwhile, the Axe Bodyspray of personal finance — cool, fresh, and even sexy — is an upstart named Mint. Its unique features, wrapped in an exceedingly clean and appealing design, are winning tech-industry plaudits and brisk traffic. Mint went live on September 18, the same day it won $50,000 in the TechCrunch40, a demo derby run by Web impresario Jason Calacanis.

What's more, Fast Company agreed to hire compatriot Rocky Barbanica to do all the "management" and "development/production" work while Scoble terrorizes the highways. Credit the guy this. Tom Sawyer couldn't have done it better. Here's a snippet from Scoble's previous PodTech show, where Barbanica promises to make Scoble's videos shorter. Keep up the good work, Rocky.

The bidders, sources say, include CNET, the online tech publisher, and Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Inc. and Fast Company. CNET's interest likely extends to the brand and the articles archive, while Mansueto might be more interested in Business 2.0's 600,000-strong mailing list of subscribers, which could bolster Fast Company's print circulation. But a sale of those assets while it might generate some cash for Time Inc., would also strengthen the buyers as print and online rivals to the magazine publishers, making those companies' bids unlikely to result in a deal.

In the inevitable accompanying podcast — why do magazines insist on doing these things? — Calacanis suggested a bunch of critical inquiries one could make of Mahalo:

How many results can we do in this fashion? Can we monetize them? Can we keep them updated? So all those questions a venture capitalist would ask or a journalist might ask as to why Mahalo wouldn't work, we feel we're figuring out, learning what those answers are.

And he didn't even question some of Calacanis's more absurd assertions, like the entrepreneur's defense of his low-tech, human approach in a comparison with Google:

He calculates that it costs Google approximately $4,000 to operate each of its servers for a year. So for the price of a dozen machines, he can have one human (who not only receives a base salary and benefits, but costs him payroll taxes) who will write some 500 terms a year and keep them up-to-date. Multiply that by his target of 100 workers and Mahalo would be able to generate 50,000 terms a year. What's more, Google's staff is 100 times larger, and precious few of them take home as little as 35 grand. In other words, however machine-driven it may be, there's nothing cheap about running Google.

And while Google doesn't disclose the number of servers it has, or the cost to operate them, it does include them in a category of its financial results called "other cost of revenues"; in the most recent quarter, this category accounted for a mere 11 percent of Google's revenues. Even a cursory analysis of Google's financials, in other words, would have told Penenberg that Calacanis's comparison is wholly fallacious.

Whatever it costs to run a server, Google's easily making that back and more. Hardly comparable to an unemployed writer producing ten brief result pages per week for a little-used, unprofitable site which is, for now, depending on Google to sell what little advertising it has.

And there are serious questions about Mahalo employees' rate of production. Can they actually keep results up to date? In the accompanying podcast, Calacanis makes the substantial admission that his fewer than 60 editors are now spending the bulk of their time approving submissions from the Mahalo Greenhouse program, where the unwashed masses create their own Mahalo results, Wikipedia-style. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it means that they're also not writing their own results pages at the same time.

As a matter of fact, the entire company has moved from writing search results internally to accepting search results externally. So we had to basically take, the entire editorial team and say, hey, we're getting so much response from the public we have to shift our whole model to accepting search results.

In a blog post, Rich Skrenta, the original founder of Dmoz, an early attempt at a user-created Web directory, claims that Mahalo's only future is through search engine optimization, or SEO. Which would be ironic, since Calacanis has railed against SEO in the past. Calacanis addressed the updating issue with this ideal scenario:

If we have a staff of 100 at Mahalo and those folk update 15 pages a day (i.e. 30 minutes per page) we can do 1,500 updates a day or update the entire 25,000 page index in ~20 days/one month. If we had the public (i.e. Greenhouse help) with the 1,000 folks in the Greenhouse we could update everything in 10-15 days. So, we can handle updating 25,000. 600,000 pages? No ... that would be a problem. :-)

Unfortunately, the Fast Company profile raises none of these issues. They would, after all, be inconsistent with a slavish profile of an entrepreneur — a genre the magazine perfected in the '90s and to which it now appears to be returning. Penenberg, who gained fame by exposing fraudster Stephen Glass, is, sadly, completely taken in by Calacanis's powers of persuasion. Just like Mahalo's investors. So we still don't know the answers to the questions "How many results can we do in this fashion? Can we monetize them? Can we keep them updated?" Fast Company ignored them. But we can't.