From what I've seen/read, it seems like his strongest skill is finding the right people and letting them do their job and excel at it.
After all without people building the content/handling things, Weblogs inc wouldn't have been such a hot property that sold to AOL for however much money it ended up selling for.
AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company.
Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312
And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295
(maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny.
Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out.
so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer.
to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work.
You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently.
A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands.
Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here.
your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you!
Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners.
I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times.
"you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny."
Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person.
"i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times."
Yes but the difference is you stand on a podium at conferences and yell to the press when you slag it off.
When you say it has value you do it on a twitter post or a quick blog post that does not even hit your homepage. You are not quite as loud in this case.
I would say to make it right you should probably need to (at a minimum)...
- Direct link out to the sites you are scraping content from. FIX THE ISSUE.
- Make an in-depth post on your blog highlighting how important SEO is to all web based businesses. Describe how you gamed social media sites and worked media and nepotistic angles to build links for Mahalo. Also describe the bait and switch public relations and attack bait angles you used to build links. Better yet...make this an in-depth case study!
- Make sure a copy of that post lands in the inboxes of your media email list and your Jason email list.
- Issue a press release announcing the above blog post.
If you do all of those then there is a pretty strong chance I will think your apology is sincere. Anything less and I will realize that this is once more another round of posturing.
Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person.
I'll probably get voted down for this, but I think you're crossing a line here. I agree with some of your opinions, but these kind of rants against a person in particular and some kind of personal dislike you have for them really hurts your case. It's just petty bullshit and it reveals personal bias that really clouds the issue.
OK, I will get started this week on these issues Aaron. I really have no ill-will toward you or SEOs.
I made a simple, uninformed comment five years ago during a Q&A session when someone asked me about SEO. Back then when we were doing Engadget and Joystiq and HAckADay we didn't do ANY SEO and our opinion of SEO was it was a waste of time.
I've personally learned from great SEOs like you and Michael Grey how to do white hat stuff, and what the best practices are.
Our goal at Mahalo is to produce great content, and yes, rank for that content when we have a GREAT page in search engines.
We don't want to rank for lower quality pages or pages that are being built out. Your anger towards me is misplaced I think... i was joking saying SEO is bullshit and it's not my fault that everyone takes my one-liners and turns them into gospel.
I will make a concerted effort to rehabilitate the damage I've done with my flippant comments. Honestly, I will. Even willing to do a joint press release with you and have you on This Week in Startups to discuss...
... provided you keep giving me all this great free advice! :-p
You are correct, my best skill is finding amazing people and supporting the heck out of them.
However, I would give myself a modest amount of credit for finding verticals a little earlier than average (silicon alley, blogs, human-powered search, etc), as well as marketing, branding and product design.
I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.
I don't claim to be smarter than anyone... I just go to work every day and try to do a little better each day.
I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.
I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always.
I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.
of course he is acting polite. he is still stealing people's content.
I am just calling a spade a spade.
I have never met the guy in person...I just think he should hold himself to a higher standard if he is going to trash an entire industry he should educate himself on best practices within it rather than claiming ignorance while building a deceptive business model.
Sounds like there's some bad blood between Jason and Aaron. Maybe I don't know enough about SEO to get the sting of Aaron's arguments, but on the surface Jason has been cordial and Aaron has been vicious. That's not helping your credibility Aaron.
That's one of the problem - most people don't know enough about SEO to know what exactly is going on. They place blind trust in those who are featured in the mainstream media.
While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice.
Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media).
With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.
It goes beyond SEO being an industry. Many "SEO's" who are actually good at what they do spend a lot less time on SEO as a profession and spend 100x more time on building businesses. Auto-generated content sites like Mahalo, eHow & other Demand Media junk are hurting their legitimate businesses with debatably unethical businesses practices.
Let's use a different industry to illustrate what is happening. Let's say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don't mention who the band it and on their website, they put up a link to download the song... but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, "hey, playing good songs gets use more listeners and more listeners get us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let's do this more often." So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve. Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.
In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.
Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.
This is like Tiger Words claiming he desired privacy for his family deeds (after he had went outside his own family). if you want the public relations when you are hyping your own company and/or trashing other people's livelihoods then you accept the greater responsibility.
you can't just choose to take all the benefit and fall back on that <em>I am no expert</em> crap when you get caught in a lie.
"if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks"
That is the big problem. The apology is insincere.
He is not doing any real backtracking or shifting of strategy...just repeating a fake apology WITHOUT addressing the issues that were brought up.
MOST CRUCIALLY putting nofollow on the links to the sites he is "borrowing" content from.
I'm not going to argue with you, because I haven't been following this, because I could give a rat's ass about Mahalo. I think what I said about downvoting still stands. You don't have to upvote him, but when he's down at -4 a few minutes after he comments, it looks less like we're having a good debate and more like a bunch of us are kneejerk attacking him. It doesn't give Jason motivation to keep talking to us when the site visually displays how little we care about his words.
keep in mind that this is like the second or third thread I have ever participated in here...I click the left arrow up to upvote a few times, but I don't even know how to downvote yet...haven't done a single one yet.
How can you call Maholo a search engine when the majority of the traffic you get comes from other search engines. How is Maholo any different than About.com?
Comments
From what I've seen/read, it seems like his strongest skill is finding the right people and letting them do their job and excel at it.
After all without people building the content/handling things, Weblogs inc wouldn't have been such a hot property that sold to AOL for however much money it ended up selling for.
His strongest skills are hype & public relations.
AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company.
Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312
And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 (maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny.
Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out.
so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer.
to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work.
You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently.
A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands.
Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here.
your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you!
Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners.
I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times.
what is it going to take to make you happy?
"you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny."
Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person.
"i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times."
Yes but the difference is you stand on a podium at conferences and yell to the press when you slag it off.
When you say it has value you do it on a twitter post or a quick blog post that does not even hit your homepage. You are not quite as loud in this case.
I would say to make it right you should probably need to (at a minimum)...
- Direct link out to the sites you are scraping content from. FIX THE ISSUE.
- Make an in-depth post on your blog highlighting how important SEO is to all web based businesses. Describe how you gamed social media sites and worked media and nepotistic angles to build links for Mahalo. Also describe the bait and switch public relations and attack bait angles you used to build links. Better yet...make this an in-depth case study!
- Make sure a copy of that post lands in the inboxes of your media email list and your Jason email list.
- Issue a press release announcing the above blog post.
If you do all of those then there is a pretty strong chance I will think your apology is sincere. Anything less and I will realize that this is once more another round of posturing.
Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person.
I'll probably get voted down for this, but I think you're crossing a line here. I agree with some of your opinions, but these kind of rants against a person in particular and some kind of personal dislike you have for them really hurts your case. It's just petty bullshit and it reveals personal bias that really clouds the issue.
OK, I will get started this week on these issues Aaron. I really have no ill-will toward you or SEOs.
I made a simple, uninformed comment five years ago during a Q&A session when someone asked me about SEO. Back then when we were doing Engadget and Joystiq and HAckADay we didn't do ANY SEO and our opinion of SEO was it was a waste of time.
I've personally learned from great SEOs like you and Michael Grey how to do white hat stuff, and what the best practices are.
Our goal at Mahalo is to produce great content, and yes, rank for that content when we have a GREAT page in search engines.
We don't want to rank for lower quality pages or pages that are being built out. Your anger towards me is misplaced I think... i was joking saying SEO is bullshit and it's not my fault that everyone takes my one-liners and turns them into gospel.
I will make a concerted effort to rehabilitate the damage I've done with my flippant comments. Honestly, I will. Even willing to do a joint press release with you and have you on This Week in Startups to discuss...
... provided you keep giving me all this great free advice! :-p
all the best,
Jason
http://www.twitter.com/jason
You are correct, my best skill is finding amazing people and supporting the heck out of them.
However, I would give myself a modest amount of credit for finding verticals a little earlier than average (silicon alley, blogs, human-powered search, etc), as well as marketing, branding and product design.
I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.
I don't claim to be smarter than anyone... I just go to work every day and try to do a little better each day.
I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.
I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always.
I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.
of course he is acting polite. he is still stealing people's content.
I am just calling a spade a spade.
I have never met the guy in person...I just think he should hold himself to a higher standard if he is going to trash an entire industry he should educate himself on best practices within it rather than claiming ignorance while building a deceptive business model.
Sounds like there's some bad blood between Jason and Aaron. Maybe I don't know enough about SEO to get the sting of Aaron's arguments, but on the surface Jason has been cordial and Aaron has been vicious. That's not helping your credibility Aaron.
That's one of the problem - most people don't know enough about SEO to know what exactly is going on. They place blind trust in those who are featured in the mainstream media.
While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice.
Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media).
With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.
It goes beyond SEO being an industry. Many "SEO's" who are actually good at what they do spend a lot less time on SEO as a profession and spend 100x more time on building businesses. Auto-generated content sites like Mahalo, eHow & other Demand Media junk are hurting their legitimate businesses with debatably unethical businesses practices.
Let's use a different industry to illustrate what is happening. Let's say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don't mention who the band it and on their website, they put up a link to download the song... but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, "hey, playing good songs gets use more listeners and more listeners get us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let's do this more often." So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve. Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.
In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.
Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.
"I never asked to be an expert"
This is like Tiger Words claiming he desired privacy for his family deeds (after he had went outside his own family). if you want the public relations when you are hyping your own company and/or trashing other people's livelihoods then you accept the greater responsibility.
you can't just choose to take all the benefit and fall back on that <em>I am no expert</em> crap when you get caught in a lie.
"if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks"
That is the big problem. The apology is insincere.
He is not doing any real backtracking or shifting of strategy...just repeating a fake apology WITHOUT addressing the issues that were brought up.
MOST CRUCIALLY putting nofollow on the links to the sites he is "borrowing" content from.
I'm not going to argue with you, because I haven't been following this, because I could give a rat's ass about Mahalo. I think what I said about downvoting still stands. You don't have to upvote him, but when he's down at -4 a few minutes after he comments, it looks less like we're having a good debate and more like a bunch of us are kneejerk attacking him. It doesn't give Jason motivation to keep talking to us when the site visually displays how little we care about his words.
keep in mind that this is like the second or third thread I have ever participated in here...I click the left arrow up to upvote a few times, but I don't even know how to downvote yet...haven't done a single one yet.
I know, I didn't mean you. I don't know if you have enough karma yet to downvote.
"human-powered search"
How can you call Maholo a search engine when the majority of the traffic you get comes from other search engines. How is Maholo any different than About.com?