Comments on: Jason Calacanis and his human powered spam

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:33:25 +0000

@Michael Spam for other search engines, yes. You don’t get a Yahoo search result pages in your Google search results, do you?

By: Michael Foord

Michael Foord — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:00:15 +0000

“if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left?”

So *by definition* all search engines are spam?…

By: John Andrews Somehow Makes Sense Of Jason Calcanis - Search Marketing Blog from Cincinnati, Ohio

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:29:20 +0000

[...] Well you will find my comments on some of the threads, but basically I am not a big fan of Jason or his projects. I don’t know him or care to. I have just watched and read enough of his comments to form this opinion. Whether it was his trashing of SEOs over a year ago or his recent project that is basically a bunch of Human Powered SPAM. [...]

By: The hunt for a Mahalo positive: Part 1 | derekville.net

The hunt for a Mahalo positive: Part 1 | derekville.net — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:35:18 +0000

[...] After railing on his site enough, I promised Jason Calacanis I’d take a fair look at his latest startup (Mahalo.com) and say something nice about it, well… once I was actually about to find something. So here’s the first video of my experience hunting around Mahalo.com for a "positive" and not just looking at it as polluting the internet with more spam. [...]

By: Derek

Derek — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:39:51 +0000

Fair enough. But, I’ll believe it when I see either a “noindex” on the “Best Computer Speakers” page or it becomes 50% original content. But oooo… do you really want to drop a #1 search result keyword? =)

And oh, 20+20+50 = 90, so what is the remaining 10% of a mahalo page going to be then? My guess is bulldog puppy videos. =P

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:20:50 +0000

fyi, those were sort of experimental pages as I discussed at the time:
http://www.calacanis.com/2007/10/21/best-computer-speakers/

We are actually no-following lots of our pages that are light on content (i.e. all tag pages and user-generated pages), while producing more and more original content on our pages that are indexed. For example, these pages from the last couple of days are equal parts links and content:

http://mahalo.com/Taiwan_Presidential_Election_2008
http://mahalo.com/Obama_Race_Speech

Over time I think you’ll see our pages grow to be over 50% original content, 20% links, and 20% UGC (i.e. reviews, votes, comments).

all the best,

jason