Blogs Bring Back Dot-Com Poster Boy

An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a profile of Jason Calacanis, the former Dot-Com bubble rider, and now the mind behind the sale of Weblogs, Inc. to AOL." From the article: "Calacanis and Alvey wanted to get in on the action, but the scale and limitations of blogs bugged them. 'We decided that one blog, like Rafat's, could make tens of thousands of dollars a year,' says Alvey. 'Definitely enough for one person who works 24 hours a day to sustain a business. But how could you get so that you could add more people?' The answer, they decided, was to build a network of blogs."

Comments

Comparing bubbles to oranges

[gbulmash]

I think three major differences between bubble purchases and current purchases are pricing, financing, and profitability. Back in the bubble, money-losing companies were selling for 9 figures and paid for almost entirely in stock. Calcanis, whatever you want to say about him, was turning a profit with Weblogs, Inc., sold for 1/10th of what bubble prices used to run, and though the details are not clear, I'm betting he got a good chunk of the sale price in cash instead of restricted stock units.

- Greg

Slashbot replies

[patternjuggler]

Cue a bunch of people saying how blogs are stupid and no one wants to read about boring details of other people's lives, jobs, hobbies, whatever.

Cue response which points out you shouldn't judge blogs by just browsing them at random like it was 1994 and you're surfing the internet by clicking on links on crappy geocities sites, you should look at ones that are popular and fit your tastes, and use google and blogsearch etc. to find them. Everything is crap if you don't have an easy way of discriminating from the good and the bad, etc.

Jase and Del

[FishandChips]

The article makes the guy sound like a total nightmare. At least, though, he doesn't walk around with a pug under his arm.

I guess the story illustrates what happens: because the internet is so open, it is also open to unlimited quantities of marketers, hype and money. These burn up new ideas at a rate like nothing else. Whatever a new idea might have been, it comes to be seen as just another vehicle for your actual entrepreneur, init, and you can no longer believe a word anyone says. There is always an agenda, and in this case it's your money in their pocket. It's only a matter of time before the whole scene has been gutted to the point of collapse and then the crowd moves on to the next big-bucks bandwagon. So I guess that blogs are, if not dead, then walking wounded because they have no credibility left. I wonder what will come next.