The Evolving Online Morality
If you’re an events manager with a death wish, invite Jason Calacanis to deliver the keynote address at your next conference. Sure, Calacanis—a serial Internet entrepreneur who made the bulk of his fortune with the sale of his company Weblogs, Inc. to AOL—will deliver an engaging, thought-provoking and sometimes flat-out inspirational talk. But then again, he might just start a riot.
After all, this is the guy who, at SES Chicago in 2006, announced—to a group of search professionals—that “SEO is bullshit!” and compared those engaging in SEO to “snake oil salesmen.”
It didn’t go over well.
Having escaped Chicago, living to speak another day, Calacanis recently addressed a room full of affiliate marketers at the Affiliate Summit West. Apparently unruffled by the flap and furor over his SEO comments, Calacanis explained to the affiliate folks that the rest of the industry saw them as the bottom rung of the food chain, wired to make the quick buck.
There was no standing ovation.
But to be fair to Calacanis, he’s not some sort of egomaniacal misanthrope who gets a perverse pleasure out of standing on a stage and belittling the audience. (Actually, he might just take a little pleasure in it.) In fact, the point he’s trying to make is a valid and intriguing one.
First of all, Calacanis was over-generalizing for effect: he sees value in ethical SEO and understands that there are legitimate best practices to follow in designing, maintaining and promoting a site that will allow it to rank higher in search results. And he certainly doesn’t see anything wrong with the fundamental concept of affiliate marketing: engaging a group of websites to help sell product or generate leads as a sort-of extended sales force.
Calacanis has a problem with those interested in gaming the system to make a quick buck—whether it’s the black-hat SEO firm that exploits a weakness in a search engine algorithm to garner a temporary high rank for an undeserving website (until the search engine closes the loophole and the site plummets off the search results page) or the affiliate who steals content to game the search engines to generate more traffic and commissions, or the marketer who floods blogs, message boards and social networks with paid posts.
According to Calacanis, it’s all borne out of a misguided ethic that has pervaded the Internet since the mid-’90s: if one is technically capable of doing something, then it’s OK.
But he—and others—see reason for optimism. As more and more black-hat marketers exploit the various systems, these systems eventually break down, to be replaced by ones that are more resistant to gaming. Consumers are helping to drive change, too. We leave MySpace to go to Facebook and then to LinkedIn as policing technologies are developed that help eliminate spam or fraud. Sites like Angie’s List—a ratings and reviews site for home-improvement contractors—take off because they are curated to ensure the reviews’ (and reviewers’) legitimacy. In other words, because they earn our trust. Calacanis himself has developed Mahalo.com, a search engine that uses human beings to find and organize the best links for given search terms—and to filter out irrelevant or spam results.
A new ethic is evolving: trustworthiness is good for business.
Tom Dellner is executive editor of Electronic Retailer Magazine and editor of its supplement, Online Strategies
Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate west summit, angie's list, aol, Electronic Retailer, facebook, jason calacanis, linkedin, mahalo.com, myspace, search engines, sem, seo, ses, weblogs
April 17th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Great thoughts Tom. Actually just read an interesting interview with the Google search integrity guru.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4259137.html
Two interesting points:
1. Google changed their algorithm 450 times in 2007. That’s more than once per day.
2. He actually wishes that “people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages.”
As more people learn the “best practice” and put more effort into SEO the system does get better and does get smarter (the problem in the past was that fewer people knew what best practice actually was) which I believe ties into your point about the systems getting better. One thing I also really like about the google method (and question whether Mahalo.com will work long term) is the fact that they refuse to manually manipulate the results as Udi discusses:
“If we find, for a particular query, that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution.”
In the long run I just think humans will never be able to filter all the massive amounts of content on the internet and a constantly improving algorithm for doing so is what I believe will continue to set google apart.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Hi Tom -
One thing I’d like to point out - Jason decided to experiement with Mahalo as an affiliate after attending Affiliate Summit.
We chatted with him about it on a podcast after the conference: http://geekcast.fm/archives/geekcast-9-jasons-first-time/