As we were elevated up towards the keynote ballroom, the presence of a higher force was there. (ok, scratch that). But there were tons of people waiting for the ballroom's doors to open to let us in to the keynote. They finally opened the door, so I elbowed Vanessa Fox, Lisa from BruceClay.com, Kim Krause Berg, Loren Baker out of the way, and decided to trip Todd Oilman and David Naylor DaveN to get to the front row. Nah, scratch that also. We are now three minutes late and I am eager to begin typing here, so let's go already Danny. Still waiting...
Danny is starting Jason is actually is video tapping his own show, and it is live on WebmasterRadio.FM. He shares Jason's bio, which is pulled from the Wikipedia.
He explained that he loves starting new companies. He was able to leave any time at his current company. They fired the CEO, and that what was encouraged him to move on from Weblogs and Netscape. He has accepted his position at Sequia (spelling) Capital. So now he needs to figure out what to build, he needs the right idea.
Danny brought up the idea of a new iPod, etc... Jason said how many of you blog, lots raised their hand. He wrote a post in the middle of the night that was titled, things I might do next. He just wrote things as if. So the whole thing spiraled out of control since then, out of a joke. One of the ideas was to become a professional poker player. He explains that being an A list blogger isnt a big deal, just read top stories at techmeme and right about those stories. All it was, was a stupid post.
Side note: I think the Incisive people (one named Tim Walsh) are sitting on my left talking about Danny's announcement about starting a new conference at SearchEngineLand.com. Yup, they are reading on their phones about Third Door Media site.
Danny asked about Netcape, first it was a browser, then a search engine, then a portal, then .... Now its a digg.com. Jason said you have this portal and its average, and they asked him what they should do with it. The number one suggestion was to redirect it to AOL.com. They decided to go with a social bookmarking solution. They said, people who say we copied Digg, those people are 12 year olds on Digg. But Digg got their idea from del.licio.us. etc. There was a big problem with Digg, where it did not have any editorial protection. They added professional editors to this idea.
Danny went into SEO, and the whole thing about his views on SEOs and search. Jason said, he thought SEO is bulls$#@ and he still does. He said just build out your pages well and the search engines will like them. There are those who cross the line. If everyone would just chill out and write good content and let Google do their job, we would all be in a better situation. He finds SEO contracts shady, he said, they lock you in at 10k per month, he said its shady. He said, all these link farms are so much work, why not just make a better site. (Kinda laughing inside right now).
You have those users who adopt early to these great products, i.e. emails, blogs, search, etc. And then people come in an pollute them. It includes the social news sites. Some people are very upset they have an editorial process in Netscape.
Jason just called payperpost evil and as being part of the force of good, he feels he needs to say something. He just used the F word in the keynote. If someone throws trash on the floor, you yell at them to clean it up. He is really passionate about pure blog posts.
Danny asks; Is forces of good and evil clearly black and white? Do you see it that way? Jason said there are a ton of borderline stuff. You need to look at the expectation of the user and the intent of the author. Danny asks about ReviewMe, disclosing that you are getting paid for the review. He explained ReviewMe is more about the link. But he explains ReviewMe is disclosing it. It is an interesting model, if the blog posters disclose in the first post how much they are getting paid for the post. He said it adds a level of complication that is unnecessary.
Danny said, what about the concept of taking the top Diggers to come over and get paid. Jason said it was his idea, and it is a crazy concept to get paid for the work you do. They wanted to pay them $1,000 per month to submit hundred something stories, any story they want, but they cant get paid per story by the advertiser, just by Netscape. Getting paid might be a sign that you are better at it then others. You can get paid to right at the NY Times without being corrupt, he said. He said this whole thing was a PR war, and he felt he lost the war.
Side Note: Incisive people just walked out to talk more.
Danny brought up that Digg thing where someone digg one of our articles and they complained about not linking directly to the story and linking to my post. Jason explains this is the issue, it is "breaking the middle man rule." At netscape, they encourage people to do a "viral link," found on X site, and then link to the main article.
Danny asks why can't people submit their own stories? Jason said that they encourage it. Digg, said it is not a rule. But some Digg members don't like it.
Word Association Round: Digg - brilliant Google - brilliant...unstoppable and good AOL - he thinks a bit, transition Techcrunch - brilliant, opinionated, more right than wrong Spam - evil, die die Netscape - the future SEO - Keep it simple Podcasting - Addictive AdSense - I love you Valleywag - liar, evil, idiot, stupid Jason Calacanis - striving, trying to interesting things, likes to work
These posts may have spelling and grammar issues. These are session notes, written quickly and posted immediately after the session has been completed. Please excuse any grammar or spelling issues with session posts.
