ShareSleuth, Mark Cuban's pet project (He calls it journalism) that seeks to uncover fraudulent companies has a new target: Orthopedic Development Corporation.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ShareSleuth, the basic idea is this: Cuban hired a guy named Christopher Carey to do investigative research into companies that may be engaging in deception and then write about them on the website. The way that Cuban pays for it is where it gets a little controversial: Before the "picks" are posted on the website, Cuban is told about them and he shorts them. This is all disclosed on the website, and Cuban bills it as a new type of financial journalism.

While I don't have any problem with what Cuban and Carey are doing, I'm not so sure it should be called journalism: Journalism is paid for through the sale of publications and advertising. ShareSleuth is more reminiscent of the work of Manuel Asensio, an investor who put out research reports slamming stocks he was short.

The site received a fair amount of negative publicity, and its latest pick differs from its first two picks, Xethanol (AMEX: XNL) and Utek (AMEX: UTK). Orthopedic Development isn't public and, as such, Cuban has no financial stake in the company. The choice of a non-public company may be an effort to appease those who complained about the supposed conflict of interest in the earlier picks, but I'm not impressed.

The problem with exposing a non-public company is this: Who cares? There's no way that we can seek to profit from the expose, and it's just not very interesting. Public fiascoes are much more fun to follow.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban is writing about his colonoscopy on his blog. That could possibly be less interesting than the piece on Orthopedic Development.