As usual, colorful serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis makes lemonade from lemons–or is it vice versa?–touting cost-cutting at his human-powered search engine start-up and newest venture, Mahalo, almost as much as he touted its prospects when he started it up a year ago with $20 million in funding.

But in a blog post yesterday, Calacanis sang perfectly in tune with the new, decidedly grimmer, times. But BoomTown has videos of when things were sunnier for Mahalo.

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Scott Moore, who runs the Yahoo Media Group, sat down with BoomTown at the company’s Santa Monica headquarters last week to talk about the future direction of content at the company.

While the Media unit has had its ups and downs over the years about exactly what it should be–such as the controversial Hollywood-esque Lloyd Braun strategy–one thing that Yahoo has consistently done well is to aggregate and distribute its own and others’ content.

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In what will be yet another new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group will announce this morning that it will buy the digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

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When I was in Los Angeles recently, I stopped by the Santa Monica offices of Demand Media, the network of social networking sites and apps maker, because of the rumors that I had heard swirling around that Yahoo was looking to purchase it for up to $2 billion.

As it turned out, reports of that possibility were greatly exaggerated.

In fact, Rosenblatt played down the idea of any Yahoo offer on the record, noting he was not interested in selling at this point anyway. And Yahoo sources confirm this and said that there has been no offer floated.

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This morning, Facebook is planning on showing a little leg to the press, throwing a “casual Open Door session… to learn more about the upcoming New Profile Design.”

You know, the long expected renovation of main Facebook pages consumers use daily, which has third-party developers in a hubbub and is likely to cause an even bigger one among users no matter how good it is?

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Here’s a video I did from a cool party I went to Tuesday night in Santa Monica, Calif., at the offices of ad network optimizer, Rubicon Project.
Organized by Beta South, a networking organization for digital start-ups in the Los Angeles area, it’s an interesting contrast to the frenetic nature of comparable Silicon Valley parties.
In [...]

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