Calacanis vs. Winer: Part II

Ah, the drama of the blogsphere. I changed my mind and am switching over to picking Jason Calacanis without even needing to borrow his dog Toro (see part 1).


Dave Winer thinks he's giving good counsel to Jason, and being a good friend. He's full of crap and in this instance being a chucklehead. Not everything is a platform or needs to be. Mahalo isn't. It's a product/service. Dave's biggest complaints seem to be that he doesn't like that he can't make money off Mahalo (oh boo hoo!) and that he doesn't like Jason's style of promotion.

Guess what, it works, it may not work for me, and it may not work for you -- but it most certainly works for Jason! That's probably why Chris Pirillo invited him to Gnomedex!

If Dave has a problem with people promoting commercial stuff at Gnomedex that Dave has no way to capitalize on, he should take that up with Chris P.

Fortunately for Dave Winer, conferences are an open platform. He's certainly welcome to host his own conference where the only presenters of commerical products/services are ones Winer can capitalize on. He can't capitalize on Mahalo. BFD.

As for Mahalo, Jason stick with your plan of getting 25,000 human engineered topics. Mahalo is an open platform in that Dave could sign up to contribute human engineered topics and even get paid for them (sorry, I couldn't resist).

I don't know if Mahalo will work out or not. If it provides more useful search, people will use it. If it doesn't, they won't. That won't have a darn thing to do with whether it's a platform or whether Winer can make money off of it.

Weblogs Inc. wasn't a platform Winer could make money off of. I'm still glad that there's an Engadget.com (and it sends complete articles via RSS, God bless 'em!) and glad that Calacanis was able to make some money off of it.