emptyage

Hell Yes: I made it to the Prison

I got one of the most welcome emails of my life not five minutes ago:

Congratulations Mathew Honan!

You are one of the lucky triathletes that have been selected as a winner for the February 1, 2008 random drawing for a slot in the Accenture Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon to be held in San Francisco on June 8, 2008. You have until February 29, 2008 at 11:59 pm to register for the race and pay your registration fee. Your slot is not transferable and will be void on March 1st. We recommend that you register right away to make sure that you are able to complete the process, don’t wait until February 29th.

On June 8th, you will get to jump off a perfectly good boat into the frigid water of the San Francisco Bay, swim with 1800 of your best friends from Alcatraz to Little Marina Green. You will climb out of the water and run (with or without shoes) one half mile to the transition area, jump on your bike and ride 18 miles (most people say that it is all up hill) and then run 8 miles (under the Golden Gate Bridge, through the sands of Baker Beach, up the infamous sand ladder and back to Marina Green to the finish line. What a great way to spend your life.

Time to get serious about training.

And if the last post is 2K, this one might just be 10K

isla de ometepe, originally uploaded by Mat Honan.

Better than 2000 words

If you were reading Waxy yesterday, you would have seen the following:

---

As I was writing up yesterday's article on The Times, I realized that there's a wide range of opinions from social media founders about undisclosed mass promotion on their communities. (Mahalo's Jason Calacanis doesn't mind, while Matt Haughey drops the banhammer on any Metafilter user who tries it.)

I contacted several founders affected by Sitelynx's activity to see their official (and personal) stance on this questionable practice.

Jason Calacanis
Founder, Mahalo

Generally, how do you guys feel about undisclosed mass self-promotion?

It's bad form to talk about yourself all the time -- it's obnoxious.

---

Okay! Hey, now it's picture time!

In all fairness, Jason went on to disclose that "I submit Mahalo links to services all the time, but it's under my name and it says Mahalo. I think people should disclose where they're coming from." And to be clear, I don't have even the slightest problem with his practice of promoting Mahalo across social networks. (If you don't want to see it, you don't have to subscribe!) But given the first statement he made in response to Andy's query, well, 1000 words, dude. 1000 words.