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Calacanis goes deeper on his $1000 offer for Netscape.com contributors

Calacanis goes deeper on his $1000 offer for Netscape.com contributors

As a brief follow-up to our post earlier about how the blogosphere freaks out whenever money is involved, we point to a recent post by Jason Calacanis of WIN/AOL:

While some folks have been shocked–SHOCKED!–that I offered to pay top bookmarkers, others have taken a day or two to think about the idea and realize that it is the totally logical evolution of “crowdsourcing” and Web 2.0.

[…]

Of course, the Web 2.0 elite want to make the decision for social bookmarkers–and for me and my company Netscape. How dare we offer people money for their work?!?!!? How dare these people get paid for their time!??!?!

Jason echos my own thoughts in my earlier post from a few days ago in which I pointed out that there’s a large quantity of “purists” who would probably only be happy if blogs never had ads and never evolved into a business.

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He goes on with some other great commentary on this subject – including how paying bloggers threatens the media elite, how paying bloggers, frightens entrepreneurs, and how the talent pool continues to grow.

And then for an irreverent look at this issue, see Those Bastards! post on how Michael Arrington is a nitwit that needs to go back to being a bad lawyer (or, kudos to Jason Calcanis for actually paying people, so un Web 2.0 ish).

View Comments (2)
  • I don’t agree with you at all.

    Calacanis, the PT Barnum of Blogging, is doing this for publicity, and nothing else. So far he’s generated some publicity, but a ton of it is negative.

    $240,000 per year is a laughable drop in the bucket for the millions of people who do social bookmarking. $12,000 a year is not enough to land a quality editor. It’s not enough to impress anyone of any quality.

    The top 20 “Diggers” are worth a quarter million? Maybe in the weird parallel universe of AOL, but not in the real world.

    Are you seriously trying to say this advance the cause of “social bookmarkers”? And why the heck does their cause need to be advanced at all? They can click “Digg” because it’s fun to them.

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