Jason Preston
Writing

Calacanis takes the podium at BBS Seattle 06, I get a Calacanis nickname

Jason Preston · 4 min read ·

Jason Calacanis gave the keynote today at the BBS 2006 in Seattle, and it was in many ways a collection of anecdotes from his ride over the past several years. He thinks this is probably because “he didn’t prepare a presentation.”

It was still a solid and interesting keynote. You can find other attendee notes here, here, and here.

  • People tend to paint with a very broad brush when they talk about blogs, but there are many different ways you can use a blog in business.

  • A blog is really just like paper - you can make a very beautiful book out of paper, you can make brochures, but you can also make toilet paper.

  • There’s a movie called Home Page, about this guy who went around to schools teaching kids HTML so they could make their own home page, before home pages were even a craze. It should be seen, apparently.

  • 2003 was really when blogs started taking the main stage. This is largely because blogging is free (or cheap), and there were a lot of problems with classical mainstream media authenticity.

  • The job of an editor is to hold people back - Jason watched a lot of the people who worked for him at SAR go on their own to become much bigger deals.

  • The Weblogs, Inc. idea showed up sort of organically over time as Jason kept seeing people having success with them.

  • How do you start? Jason set out to steal Nick Denton’s most talented people. It would be fun.

  • What’s good business? Get people who know what they’re doing, and support the hell out of them.

  • He went looking for an editor, but realized you don’t need an editor when you’re running a blog. What you need is a person to guide the subject matter, not edit.

  • Marc Cuban wanted a blog. Jason: when a billionaire asks you a favor you do it.

  • AOL’s first offer - Jason said “wait a year” - Weblogs, Inc. is a very young company at this person.Also, we can’t let you edit the bloggers. Once you edit the bloggers, it’s over.

  • The bloggers and WIN will lay the smack down hard on AOL, especially now that AOL pays the checks. It’s what makes them bloggers.

  • Face the facts: some people are great bloggers and some people suck at it. People with good products let the products speak for themselves.

  • A list blogger in 30 days: go to techmeme, pick the top story today, write something halfway intelligent, mention the five other people that wrote about it, and come to a conference once in a while.

  • Blogging is the biggest meritocracy in the history of media. How you do is up to you. If you’re number 73 on the the list, blogging is not broken…you suck.

  • It’s as simple as leaving intelligent comments all over the place.

  • People keep getting sneaky - the evil people - they whisper “hey you,” he points to me, “two-laptop guy” - this is my new nickname - “let me give you a third laptop, and…shhhh…don’t tell anyone…but write about how cool it is, and I’ll give you $15”

  • What we do as bloggers is arguing. It’s what we do. We debate. Some people think we’re angry when we’re writing - Jason is always smiling when he sounds angry online. Debate is good. It makes for better stuff.

  • Spam and evil practice enablers are just like people carrying drugs around. You can’t shrug your shoulders and say “I’m just a carrier.” It doesn’t fly.

  • Calacanis will be doing Calacaniscast with GoDaddy and Podtech, who have sponsored the show with over $150,000 that is going to put two kids through a really nice private school in New York.

  • My question: audio or video for the pod/videocast future? Jason dodges: both. People want different mediums for different activities, so people should provide video content and audio content and let the user pick what they want. OK, so I guess it’s not a huge dodge, and probably correct.

  • Next question: Why did you sell Weblogs Inc? Jason: it’s a difficult question for any company - when to sell. It’s based a lot on, for example, what’s good for shareholders. There’s all this “sold too early, sold too late” stuff, and it’s just a guess at picking the right time for you and your company and team. Plus Marc Cuban needed his money back, or he’d be broke.

  • Question: pay per post is evil? Answer: not if you’re transparent. Just have a full disclosure about the pay-per-posting setup. If you want to make a media business out of it - you never want anyone to ever ever be able to question your integrity. Ever. So no freebies no junkets.