DISQUS

Actually, I'm a big fan of folks taking a real vacation and turning off the laptop.... i find folks come back 10x more focused and energized when they take time off.

work hard/play hard is actually my position on it.

best j

Howard Lindzon: "Digg is truly the most useless of the big Web 2.0 sites."

Reality: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+walls...

Calacanis insight: Yes, 25m folks a month *in the US ALONE* according to Compete.com--which under reports--is the definition of a "useless" business.

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Howard Lidzon: "it can’t make money."

Reality: digg is making at least 12-15M a year right now. It would make that with or without the Microsoft deal.

Calacanis insight: Lidzon is such a nobody, who has done so little in the internet space, that his only shot at getting any kind of attention is to write really weak link-bait. Henry: really, you understand the metrics of this industry so well, why give a platform to someone with such a weak, inaccurate analysis. It makes it look like either a) you were forced to post this because he's an LP in your investors company (which is obviously not the case) or b) that you're going for the cheap page views like you're Nick Denton (which you're not). Suggest you go for the long-term brand building strategy and leave the "digg sucks because i couldn't build something 1/10,000th as important" for the comments on Valleywag.

gosh that looks ugly.... the feature is still being finished and it's supposed to look a lot cleaner.

I actually have 2,000 folks waiting to be added... I save my last 100 spots for real friends months ago. :-)

Wikipedia would be the biggest example of this in fact. They are not the highest quality, but they do have a page on almost everything.

OK, i have to just say this is very frackin cool.

that's it.

In theory you are correct, but in practice probably not. The fact is the value of paying off a guide might be a couple of dollars or a couple of hundred dollars. The value of a guide to work at Mahalo is thousands, tens of thousands, or more dollars. Also, the Guides have pride and integrity--we hire based on that--so money is not going to motivate them in 99.9999% of cases me thinks.

all the best,

Jason

couldn't agree more. The country is facing very hard times, and mike is the most qualified. Run Mike Run! It's not too late!

I'm not a fan of paid reviews sites. It feel artificial to pay someone to review a product.

Of course, sometime people pay focus groups so I'm sure the review folks are saying "we're no different than focus groups!"

If there is disclosure in the *FIRST* and *LAST* sentence of the review that it is paid for I think I'm ok with it... and if the links have no follow!

j

Except at Gnomedex you lead the mob. :-)

to take two very personal examples:

Fred's Kozmo.com was a great company that ran out of money. it is working today in many cities in various forms. :-)
My Silicon Alley Reporter was a great company that ran out of money. It's working today at AlleyInsider. :-)
SixDegrees was a great company that ranout of money. You could say too early I guess, but too early is another way of saying not enough money to go the distance.
There were a ton of video hosting companies that got tanked like iClips before YouTube. not sure more cash would have saved any because they didn't have the DMCA rules back than.
best j

Adding to the complexity of this is the fact that services like Alexa are so easy to game it's laughable. At the early stages of a startup there is no way for Alexa, comscore, quantcast, etc. to really track the companies accurately.

Of course, if you're a solid entrepreneur you disregard the press and focus on the product. That is what ThisNext has done (i'm on the board of ThisNext), and that nice growth curve shows *real* startup growth. A spike like the Like.com one screams of buying traffic to me.... especially after a dip during the holiday when they should have been growing. It wold be interesting to see where their traffic is coming from... if it's organic great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they bought that spike.

Frankly, I *hate* services that send me a new password when I forget it and I LOVe services that just send me my password.

If someone has hacked into your email aren't you already compromised big time?!

obviously the new password/password reset function is safer, but it's also a pain in the neck. I understand for a bank, but for a bookmarking/social network like Mahalo or StumbleUpon?! Is that overkill?

Like you said, many services send you a reminder email... is that really so wrong?!

best j

Actually, I've said many times from the start of Mahalo that it is 1/3rd Wikipedia, 1./3rd search, and 1/3rd other.

In terms of rehashing the event I simply think it was rude of you to yell at me in the middle of my presentation. If you had waited until the Q&A like a, well, normal person it would have been fine by me. That's just how people behave--it's common courtesy.

I love debate and you know that. We've debated 100's of times and I've never had a problem with that. No one is afraid of taking me on--that's a joke. People write blog posts all the time challenging what I say. So, let's not pretend this is some kind issue with me silencing people. People can attack me as often as they like. Screaming from the back row? Well, that's just rude as I've said. I've spoken at events for over a decade and only one person in that time has ever yelled at me: you.

I accepted your apology... move on dude! Life is short..

Best Jason

sorry if that wasn't clear....

1. If you have access to capital build until you reach critical mass because focusing on revenue too early keeps you from getting to critical mass.

2. If you don't have access to capital then build revenue streams early and often.

best j

That title is not fair and you know it very well Mathew... however, I applaud your link-baiting skills. :-p

To be totally clear, I was on the other side of the fence a couple of years ago. Before Weblogs, Inc. I had to build a business based on making money TODAY, not three to five years from now.

Today? Yes, I'm part of the group that can get a project funded. That's just reality and I'm certainly grateful for it. I also would never apologize for it... if Ev and Marc Andreessen can raise tons of money to build out Twitter and NING over a five year plan that's great... they earned that right.

If someone new to the game (like me back in the 90s) has to prove themselves so be it!

You don't have to be a "player" to make it happen, but if you want to take the "build for three years before thinking about revenue" model you better have a track record or a lot of money in your pocket!

Happy new year,

Jason

Personal brand gets you a couple of mentions, but after that it's the product that matters. In fact, the whole "internet rockstar" thing is way overblown in my opinion. No one is going to use a product over the longterm because they like the CEO/founder. Even Steve Jobs can't save a bad product. If iPhones started crashing three times a day or dropping calls people would hate it, and they might still love their MacBooks and ipods.

I'm thankful that we get a little extra attention, but frankly you also get a lot of bad attention too... I'd love to have launched Mahalo without people knowing it was my product. In fact, I thought about doing a very soft launch and not telling anyone. That would have been interesting huh?! :-)

I turn them on once and a while... don't tell anyone! :-)

Give it time Ed... we're still in beta an only have 22,000 pages that represent ~200k searches. We're adding 1,000 pages a week so it should get better an better over time.

well, in the face of lies and absurdity you don't really have many options. It's either ignore or amuse yourself. :-)

StumbleUpon is very, very cool... unfortunately, when it comes to search most users are not going to install toolbars or use features like this (at least not today). Same with delicious... very cool for folks in the top 1-3% of the audience, but not very useful for the masses. I think semantic search has the same challenge: folks don't want to fill out a form to get their results. They want to type one or two words into a box and get a big reward.... with Mahalo they get that.

That being said, folks building Mahalo pages use delicious and stumble upon all the time to find interesting links to include on our pages. I think social bookmarking and editorial search do overlap in terms of themes, but just not for end users.

best j

ha!

isn't it amazing... add the word "official" and it's the top story of the day. Leave that word out and no one cares.

Note: The semantic web definition was unauthorized and as such invalid. Additionally, your blog post was not pre-approved for double-opt in rebuttal, and as such will be downgraded in the index.

For more information please check the official, pre-approved response to your unauthorized comments.


best,

J

Thanks for the unauthorized feedback on the official definition Fred.

You are correct in that I'm building a business around what I think the future is: human and machine excellence woven into one fabric. Now, I know that it's a crazy concept to some to align your personal beliefs with your business efforts, but having watched your investment strategy over the past 12 years I think you can feel me. Hold on, someones at the door.... I just got a pint of ice cream delivered at half-price, delivered in 20 minutes.... OK, I'm back (zing! pow!).

Now, on to your unauthorized points.

1. "The official definition" in my headline should have tipped you off to this being tongue in check, but as your response was unauthorized you're clearly not playing by the rules. All responses to blog posts originating off of your blog in Web 3.0 must require a token pre-approving them by both parties. It's double-opt in rebuttal technology that I've patented... it's in the new version of Wordpress and an open source ping server (mayIinterjectOMATIC.org is being setup now).

Moving on...

2. The social web has been here for, what, five years? It's 90% complete and it still hasn't found a business model beyond "sell the traffic to Google or Microsoft for three years" and deal with our own bottom line later.

3. The semantic web is hype term--something I'd never participate in clearl--obsessed on by VCs scouring the eTech conference for a hype word to sell to their LPs for the continuation of database tyranny. It's easier for VCs to think the world is designed into buckets that can be manipulated into hockey stick performance that can in turn be sold for a hockeystick return. The truth is that art plus the commoditized technological will prevail in the next era.

Programmable and semantic web.... ohhhh!!! so such big terms. I'm so intimidated by them I just want to give up and open a sushi bar on the LES! Semantic web=structured data and that's been around forever. The web is just catching up to what banks and airlines have been doing for decades. Will it be powerful? Certainly it will be nice to be able to pull down Yelp! reviews and format them for your phone better, but that's a VCARD and VCAL standard-level improvement on live. Good, but not great.

In the (Web 3.0) future please remember to have your blog posts cleared through the central Flameoff authorization center. Filters showed 18% hostility toward the subject in this post--a full 4% higher than the national and 2% higher than your local/zipcode average.