Jason Calacanis: Charlatan Douchebag

2 Responses | December 6th, 2006

Jason CalacanisI don’t know what it is with AOL folks lately. On the heels of Ted Leonsis entering the SEO world, we have Jason Calacanis calling SEO “bullshit” in his keynote at Search Engine Strategies Chicago.

So, who is Jason Calacanis? I’m sorry…Jason McCabe Calacanis. The III. Ok, I made that last one up.

Jason Calacanis…or as he likes to refer to himself, Jesus McCabe Christ…founded and sold Weblogs Inc to AOL. It was a blog network fueled by puppy tears and monetized about as well as my freshman year Geocities page. He sold it to AOL for $25M and heralded himself as awesome.

Maybe I’ve been hanging around Silicon Valley too long, but a $25M liquidity event is pretty weak. Especially for a media entity. A media entity we give a beatdown wherever we compete with it. As I mentioned on Threadwatch, if we only got $25M for the media company we started this year, I’d jump out of my window. Nay, I’d run and jump out of my window looking for the perfect 10 concrete swan dive.

After he sold Weblogs Inc., AOL made him General Manager of Netscape. There, as our ever-innovative hero, he decided to build a Digg clone. With that spiraling into the ground, he allegedly “quit” and posted his love letter to Jon Miller, the ousted AOL CEO.

JC went on to say something to the effect of “build quality sites and Google will rank them.” Uh huh. Try building a Viagra or mortgage site with quality content. Content is not king. Content isn’t even allowed in the castle, princess.

I hear Jason has now accepted an Entrepreneur in Residence slot (actually it’s an EIA slot, but that’s another dumb story) at Sequoia Capital. I can tell you with absolute certainty the partners at Sequoia are not SEO adverse. If he spews this latest round of shit in his next deck, he won’t even get his parking funded.

Lastly, you have to be some sort of ungrateful fuckstick to take a dump on the chest of SEO during your keynote at SES. I know he won’t learn from this so I want to help Jason help himself. I’d like to personally invite him to keynote the Longshoremen’s Annual Gala. Or a NAMBLA Convention. I would literally pay $25,000 to see that.

Jason Calacanis: The Icarus of the Internet. Edit (More Jason Calacanis Links):

Jason Calacanis - Graywolf
Jason Calacanis - Digg
Jason Calacanis - SEOBlackhat
Jason Calacanis - Squidoo
Jason Calacanis - MySpace
Jason Calacanis - The Weblog
Jason Calacanis - Weblogs, Inc.
Jason Calacanis - via Wikipedia
Jason Calacanis - via JenSense.com
Jason Calacanis - Gothamist
Jason Calacanis - Technorati
Jason Calacanis - Techcrunch
Jason Calacanis - Techcrunch 2
Jason Calacanis - The Media Center
Jason Calacanis - New York Magazine
Jason Calacanis - via digg
Jason Calacanis - via Edge
Jason Calacanis - via Blog Business

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  1. Commented by markus941 at 6th December 2006, 7:33 pm

    Google might have to give him a “handjob” after all the SEO’s he’s pissed off are done stuffing all the Calacanis SERPS ;)

  2. Commented by not Ted Leonsis at 2nd January 2007, 5:16 pm

    No offense intended, but that’s got to be the butt-ugliest trackback I’ve ever seen in my life. Why the hell do people leave those things? To me it says “I can’t be bothered to leave a comment, but hey, here’s some gibberish”. I hope trackbacks die a horrible death in 2007 and get sent to whatever layer of hell is reserved for the Macarena, “baby on board” signs, Walter Mondale and all other transient detritus that once seemed like a good idea.

    /rant

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