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Comment by bonsaitree | Hacker News Reader

There's smart, shrewd, duplicitous, deceptive, and finally downright dishonest. I don't know the man personally, but it's my opinion that Mr. Calacanis's business practices moved into that final category some time ago.

It's actually really sad. I wonder what's driven him to this level. Greed? Ego? 3rd party investor pressure? Simply not wanting to ever have his name associated with a repeat failure?

Especially amongst the entrepreneur crowd which he espouses to represent, truthful "honest" failure itself is looked upon less harshly than shady "gamed success".

Though in retrospect totally full of late 90s Internet hype, I remember being inspired by his Charlie Rose interview back in the "Silcon Alley" days of NYC:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#...

What happened to THAT Jason?

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I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the positives he's done for the startup community.

Techcrunch50

This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)

Unfortunately, as is the case with Mahalo, when one is both the CEO and "public face" of a corporation's brand, it is difficult partition the two relms outside of clearly personal matters (e.g. health, friends, family, etc.). A classic case being Martha Stewart.

In some instances, with morality and 'key executive personnel' insurance clauses in compensation agreements, they are, in fact, inextricably contractually coupled. As the saying goes, "it comes with the territory" and I'm sure is adequately reflected in his ownership of the company and current compensation.

Also, FWIW, I don't believe this was his original plan (e.g. Mahalo Daily's original format hosted by Veronica Belmont). Nevertheless, that's been the situation for years and Jason, and his board, have apparently seen no good reason to change it.

I believe that Jason's original plan was to have a true search engine with quality human written pages that people would want to use as their homepage instead of google. However this plan was not successful and Jason has realised the opportunity to drive huge amounts of traffic to Maholo from Google. This means that ranking in google for hundreds of thousands of keywords comes first and the quality of content on the pages comes second. It's obvious by the number of ads on the pages that they don't care about the user experience. They know that if people don't find what they were searching for they will click on an ad when leaving.

Not exactly.... take a look at the how to articles, walkthroughs, buzz news on the homepage and Q&A community. We're doing some amazing content and Aaron is focusing on short pages that are not ranked in any search engine and, that frankly, we don't let folks build any more (we started with an open system like wikipedia where anyone could build and build they did... now we have a system like MTurk where you have to complete the page before we publish it).

the page we get traffic for ten to have a LOT of content... also, if we see a page gets more than 25-50 page views we put a writer on it to build it out.

so, basically nothing that ranks is a short content page (stub in wikipedia terms).

however, the truth is google doesn't rank short pages except for VERY long tail ones.... and even that is rare.

google ranks you for long, deep content that is updated.

Aaron is making a big deal out a problem that doesn't exist because he is mad at me for saying seo is bullshit back in 2006. :-)

PEOPLE, QUIT DOWN-VOTING THIS MAN!

I'm that much of a hacker news user, but I come around here enough to know that this site prides itself on reasoned discussions. We're all supposed to be thinking adults, we can politely read what he has to say and decide for ourselves if he's full of it or not.

We don't need the mob doing the internet version of throwing rotten fruit at him.

Thanks for that. :-)

I also feel that Mahalo falls into that category and I don't understand what the problem is with us explaining the SEO value of our Q&A/knowledge platform.

It's excellent at white-hat SEO, just like Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia are.

I am surprised you fall in the trap of this guy who attacks Calacanis to change or shape a bad image of him. I don't know anyone of them, and it's obvious this is a personal attack.

Who is this guy who will tell someone else how to run their company?

With regards to personal attacks, see my reply below.

No management directives were given in the original article, nor my comment. For all we know, this "business model" is being forced upon Mahalo given the present economic climate.

Although I think it unlikely, Jason himself may not feel he has any other option and is being forced by the other investors in the company down this revenue path.

I urge you to read the original article and the previously posted comments on this thread for the full context of Mahlo's behavior and Mr. Calacanis' response. It's the double-speak and clearly disingenuous ignorance of his response which is the crux of the matter.

Your points only emphasize that this is a personal contrariness, that puts others/us in the middle for no reason, using Calacanis any kind of company tactics from the author's point of view, as an edge to make a public issue.

old-fashion publicity trick

I fail to see how there's a "middle" here at all.

We're both participants in a public online discussion regarding the behavior of the CEO of a company which, at least for me, I can say I have no legal vested interest or direct financial dealings.

Fundamentally, this is between Mr. Calacanis, the management of Mahalo, and Google.

We're both mere spectators. By replying personally, Mr. Calacanis chose to make this a personal public issue--in both the original article & this forum. That's entirely within his purview. I'm sure he's experienced enough to know the potential ramifications of those actions.

That's exactly the issue. The dispute if any should be between the interested parties.

How do you consider yourself not caught in the "middle" when you potentially change your view about someone based on one source?

Was that Jason's approach when he flamed Squidoo publicly over and over again in the media until he got their site penalized by Google? Guess not, eh.

And keep in mind Squidoo was not automating and scraping on the scale that Mahalo is today. So Mahalo is far worse.

> For all we know, this "business model" is being forced upon Mahalo given the present economic climate.

I find this a little tough to buy. I thought the concept of "human-powered search" smelled a little funky from the beginning. In fact, it smelled so funky that I was really surprised that well-respected VCs invested in it. I figured there had to be something in the prospectus that wasn't in the public marketing.

Ask Jason how many humans are on staff who do editorial.

I bet (with at least 99:1 odds) the number is closer to 0 than it is to 10 when you back out the ~ 100 contractors around the world.

So then what is really human powered about the Mahalo scraper site?

I also bet Jason is surprised at how much I know about his business model. :D

He moved to LA.

LA is really nice..... like New York City with better weather and a beach. :-)

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