Max Gladwell

Blogging pioneer and Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis exits the blogosphere with a bit of online theater. In the process, he brings up some good points about the actual practice of blogging.

We’ve worked in a number of different industries: cycling, snowboarding, publishing, adventure travel, automotive, technology, biofuels. Even a bit of fine fragrance. The one thing people in these industries seem to have in common is a tendency toward geocentrism i.e. the belief that they’re industry is at the center of the universe. That was our first thought as we read Jason Calacanis’ farewell blog post and follow-up email, in which he officially retires from blogging.

If you’re not in the tech world, then you probably don’t know Calacanis from Copernicus. Most notably, he’s CEO of the human-powered search engine Mahalo and a co-founder of Weblogs. Calcanis is a master of self promotion, especially when it comes to using social media. Most have dismissed this stunt as yet another well-executed self promotion. Indeed, few others could announce that they were retiring from blogging and garner so much attention, even if that attention is confined to the small world of tech blogging. Which is partially our point.

Calacanis declares that blogging is dead. He qualifies this as follows:

“…while blogging is clearly booming, there has been a deep qualitative change in the nature of the ’sphere. There are so many folks involved in blogging to today (sic), and it’s moving at a much quicker pace thanks to “social accelerants” like TechMeme, digg, Friendfeed and Twitter. Folks are so desperate to be heard–-and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–-that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual hearing.

Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to win at blogging: “show up every day.” In 2003 and 2004 that was the case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from whatever you’ve said.”

When Calacanis refers to “blogging”, he’s clearly referring to the world of tech blogging. There’s certainly a case to be made there. No fewer than 15 tech blogs will break the same story within an hour…because we need 15 different points of view on FriendFeed Rooms. But the world of blogging extends well beyond the tech niche. It’s giving voice and power to moms, and it can be just as valuable in terms of business strategy for a tech company and clothing company alike. We’re afraid Calacanis is suffering from serious geocentrism in declaring the death of blogging. Still, he makes many valid points.

Admittedly, we’ve not followed Calacanis to any degree as a blogger or entrepreneur, and we don’t use Mahalo. But what we have read aligns with our opinions on topics like SEO and social media. Calacanis is a huge critic of manipulative SEO tactics that attempt to game the system. So are we. It’s basically search spam. In this particular tirade he critiques the social marketing tactics that blogs and bloggers use to promote themselves, one of which is SEO. As we outlined in Be a Beacon, these are targeted and efficient ways to broadcast your signal and find the people who are open to finding you. These channels are most abused in the tech world, but we do find it elsewhere.

Each category of Digg appears to have a clique of users and power users who vote stories to the front page…or not. So it can be about as democratic as a Chicago mayoral election, circa 1940, and it takes a lot of time and effort to penetrate their ranks…time where you could be blogging. Still, Digg serves the dual purpose of finding news to blog about, so the time is mostly well spent. The root of the problem Calacanis identifies, though, extends well beyond blogs and social media.

He laments how ad-driven market forces have created conditions where page views are all that matter. “Nick Denton has reworked the bloggers pay at Gawker Media to reflect not the quality of the words but the number of page views those blog posts get. He doesn’t pay by word count, he pays by page views. He’s closed the loop between editorial and advertising, turning the Chinese wall into a block party.” It’s the yellow journalism of our era, except it’s called link baiting. Write something outrageous and hope that the outrage generates lots of links and page views, while simultaneously submitting it to Digg and promoting it through Twitter, etc. This shortcoming, however, is hardly unique to blogs. After all, why does a 500-word story on the New York Times website take two pages to read?

The problem is flawed metrics. And these flaws beget more flaws until the system collapses. Think of it like the housing meltdown. Lenders and investment banks used bad metrics to originate and package and repackage all of those home loans. That single, fundamental flaw created the credit and housing crisis. Online advertising is similarly flawed. We’re using the wrong metrics to determine the value of an ad or page view. Instead, the industry should move toward engagement. Because I’d rather engage one person in my brand than have a million people view a page because of a sensational headline and engage none of them.

In short, we need to move toward quality versus quantity. This can be done through sponsorships and many other engagement mechanisms that put a premium on quality content. Once that is complete, perhaps Calacanis will emerge from retirement, declare victory, and garner more accolades from the incestuous niche market that is tech blogging.

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