Slashdot Mirror
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."
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
multiple writers, one location and one general direction?
amazing.
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.
Blogs should not be used for trivial diaries, and that I fear is what the AOL users will use them for.
No, blogs can be used for whatever people want to use them for.
Its how they are indexed and linked that matters.
If 10 bazillion people all want to talk about their fuzzy heads and broken dreams, then so be it.
In an ideal world, we would not be forced to look at them.
Google still needs tweaking to remove them.
liqbase
Having worked for them (and no, I am not lying, I did), I can attest to that. (Well, the first two bits.) They also have some of the worst contracts on Earth for their slaves... Sorry, employees. Just a little shy of having to sign away your soul and your first born.
The feeling I had the whole time I was with them is if you join their little cult (and believe me, that's the atmosphere on the private mailing list etc... Used to make me feel physically sick reading it sometimes) you'll get on famously. If you ain't prepared to drink the Kool Aid, though, your tenure will be very short.
A handful of folk at the top are getting rich off those being paid peanuts down below. The sad thing is those people are saying "Yes, please, give me more." There are people there who actually think posting on one of their sites will lead them to a top career in writing, when in reality they'd most likely get laughed out of the office of anyone they showcased that too.
Suffice to say, if you're ever on Digg and see a link from one of their sites, chances are it's a self link, that will be coupled with a begging post to the company mailing list saying "Please Digg my story". Content should float on it's own accord, not be helped to the top by a bunch of brainwashed sychophants. (And that was one of the many reason I was sick of working for them.)
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.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
My old boss gave me an invite to a party he threw back in the go-go days of the late 1990s. He was worse in person.
I would occassionally look at his magazine when waiting for a meeting with someone (but I would never pay for it). I did subscribe to his daily e-mail alerts, but seldom read them. The whole thing was purely a product of the bubble, and he was most definitely a creature of the bubble.
In an era when people were making huge investments based on fads rather than business plans, Jason Calacanis positioned himself as the arbiter of all dot-com related fads. He threw parties that were a bunch of people congratulating each other for how thoroughly their soon-to-be-bankrupt companies would change the world. The parties would also serve as prime places for people working for companies that were about to run out of money to connect with people who just got venture capital funding. At the one of these parties that I went to, someone actually tried to hire me with the pickup line of "my partner and I have started 20 companies between us." When I asked, he sheepishly admitted that the one they'd started that week was the only one that wasn't bankrupt.
I can't blame Calacanis. After all, if he hadn't taken up the role, someone else would have. I can't say that I miss the days of having to wonder how long my next employer will stay in business...
-JMP
There is another business venture consisting of associated blogs - Pajamas Media - which should be mentioned in this context. Its business model is based on creating a multi-blog advertising system. As far as I know, pajamas uses serious political blogs rather than "daily diary" sorts of things.
Perhaps we need a different term for serious blogs about whatever subject. Also a term for the commenter community that grows up around each one. Here's your chance to get famous, although Bill Quick, who invented the term "blogosphere," doesn't seem to have gathered enough fame from that.
The only good weather is bad weather.
I can't substantiate the parent's ad hominem attack on the Weblogs Inc co-founder, but the air of pretension is exactly the reason I stopped reading sites like Engadget. Everything is treated like a gossip item. Imagine if an item on Slashdot were presented with impeccable spelling and grammar but treated like a bunch of valley girls were reporting it.
Slashdot: Google annonced its new calendar service today. Google Calendar ingrats with Outlook and iCal and is the most advanced calendar service available for free as in beer
Engadget: OMG, like Google announced its new calendar service. All you other guys can just like F off because this is the shizzle. Google Calendar lets you get your meeting on from your web browser and it totally has all the Outlook and iCal integration goodness we know you're just spooging your Victoria's Secret underwear about. Get your invite today, dog!
For more information, click here.
The ability to format the data as a diary, or a collection of diaries, is not in and of itself anything I would consider noteworthy. The content may be, and sometimes is, but the use of extra layers of language to describe something that doesn't need describing just obscures what is interesting by emphasizing the points that are not.
(eg: There are plenty of commercial sites on the Internet today, but the use of "e-commerce" as a specific term is on the decline and "dot-com" is generally a term of ridicule. Sometimes, language gets in the way of the expression.)
As I see it, blogs that are essentially just personal rants will die a richly-deserved death, but "insider" blogs - which the media can draw from without being in danger of lawsuits, grand juries, etc - will likely prosper. "Special Interest Groups" (SIGs) do well as blogs - Slashdot is an example - but I doubt you can manufacture a SIG from a blog alone.
We will know when blogs have become totally accepted. That will occur when we no longer need to see them as anything special, they'll just be a part of the whole.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)