However, I would give myself a modest amount of credit for finding verticals a little earlier than average (silicon alley, blogs, human-powered search, etc), as well as marketing, branding and product design.
I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.
I don't claim to be smarter than anyone... I just go to work every day and try to do a little better each day.
I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always.
I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.
I am just calling a spade a spade.
I have never met the guy in person...I just think he should hold himself to a higher standard if he is going to trash an entire industry he should educate himself on best practices within it rather than claiming ignorance while building a deceptive business model.
While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice.
Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media).
With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.
In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.
Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.
This is like Tiger Words claiming he desired privacy for his family deeds (after he had went outside his own family). if you want the public relations when you are hyping your own company and/or trashing other people's livelihoods then you accept the greater responsibility.
you can't just choose to take all the benefit and fall back on that <em>I am no expert</em> crap when you get caught in a lie.
"if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks"
That is the big problem. The apology is insincere.
He is not doing any real backtracking or shifting of strategy...just repeating a fake apology WITHOUT addressing the issues that were brought up.
MOST CRUCIALLY putting nofollow on the links to the sites he is "borrowing" content from.
How can you call Maholo a search engine when the majority of the traffic you get comes from other search engines. How is Maholo any different than About.com?
