"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Web 3.0: The Age of Expertise

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

Yobongo, the iPhone app that "makes it super fun and easy to chat with people nearby," has finally gone live in the iTunes App Store. After a month in beta testing, Yobongo has shown itself to be a well-designed, functional mobile chat room.

Now, just one thing remains to be seen - can it deliver on its promise of "ambient real-time communication"?

According to Elston, the release is going to focus on San Francisco, Austin (home of this month's SXSW festival) and New York City. When users launch the app in one of these cities, the app will determine in real time what chat group they will be added to according to their location, who they might have spoken with in the past and group density.

"We analyze every pair of messages sent through the system and use that to build up an understanding of who you like talking with," explained Elston. Then when you open Yobongo we place you with people you have the strongest affinity for."

So far, however, the app has simply served as a private mobile chat room for a hand-picked group of 150 beta testers. So how do they know that, once it goes live and out to the masses, it's going to function as planned? They already released the app under a different name in Canada to test out the location and grouping functionality.

Will It Translate?

When blogger Robert Scoble discussed the app last month, he asked a key question of it - can it "avoid the 'masses are asses' chat room problem?"

While Elston provided us with a slew of statistics on the app's usage over the last month, there's only one problem - Yobongo users, so far, consist of a hand-picked group of early adopters, tech insiders, bloggers and Silicon Valley techies. Can we judge adoption and usage on how much these folks like talking to each other in a private mobile chat room? We're not so sure.

At the same time, it's solidly designed, functional and could have a strong showing as a way to meet random folks at the year's largest gathering of techies and the often socially-inept. As Scoble asks, "Will it still be interesting when we get drunk at SXSW?"

One commenter points out that location, just like real identity (which Yobongo also requires) could help deal with this problem.

"Location limiting alone is huge," he writes. "I'm less likely to be an ass to you if there aren't six routers and four firewalls between us."

Of course, there's just one more question to ask: Do users really want this? Were we really missing out on being able to chat with small groups of people who are located nearby? We have Twitter for people we know and don't know. We have GroupMe, Kik, Fast Society and any number of other group messaging apps for folks we already know. Is the socially "unknown," the stranger, what people were really looking for in their mobile communications experience?

For now, the only thing to do will be to go grab yourself a copy and see if it can, indeed, deliver.

Over the next two days at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, California, more than 50 companies will take the stage and introduce their product in six minutes flat. It's a format that has become an industry standard, with conferences like TechCrunch 50, TechCrunch Disrupt and LAUNCH following in its footsteps.

A continual criticism of DEMO over the years, however, has been that the price of entry is simply too high. At nearly $20,000, the cost of getting on stage at one of the world's pre-eminent tech conferences can be prohibitive to say the least, so we decided to take a look at how funding broke down for the $1,000,000 in presentations we're seeing over the 48-hours.

52% of companies that disclosed funding disclosed $1m in funding or less.  85% less than $5 million.  32% disclosed between $1m and $5m, the most popular category.  10% disclosed $10m in funding or more.  The most funded of the group is content security firm WebSense, which reported more than $50m in funding.

How does this compare to the Launch conference last week, which argued DEMO was too pricey for bootstrapped startups to launch at? Though the data is incomplete (we could only find funding data for 7 of 37 companies at Launch), it's worth at least a passing mention that the Launch companies that disclosed any funding on Crunchbase have raised an average of $2m each.  That's roughly in the same sweet spot as DEMO.

The company demonstrated today how its technology, which is currently in pre-production in China, lets a user put a sticker containing a tiny sensor and a year's worth of battery power, on the handle of a toothbrush, for example. The motion of the toothbrush sends a message to the Green Goose base station which then publishes a record of the activity online. A wide range of everyday activities can be tracked and the whole system was a big crowd pleaser at Jason Calacanis's Launch conference. Two members of the panel of investor judges put $100,000 into the startup on the spot while the company was still on stage. A third, Bill Warner, had already invested. "It's amazing and there's so much more you haven't even heard," he said about the company.

ReadWriteWeb wrote about Green Goose in February of last year (those investors should read RWW more closely, apparently, might have got better terms) when the company was framing itself as a tool for ecological and financial responsibility. It's based in both San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

The company seems to have shrunken its sensor design substantially and reframed itself as a health and wellness instrumentation service. It's all about actualizing your intentions and measuring your behavior as a game, according to the service's site.

Water bottles, tooth brushes, bikes, pill bottles and other objects can be turned into sensors that track our interaction with them and then publish that data online. All thanks to a simple sticker or other attachable sensor. It's the simplest and most pleasing example we've seen yet of the widely anticipated trend called The Internet of Things.

All kinds of formerly disconnected devices will be brought online in the coming months and years, their activities and interactions no longer ignored by their users but now tracked, stored and analyzed for patterns, thresh holds and opportunities by web based applications and interfaces. A more measured world will in theory be a more rational, more just and more sustainable world. It looks like it may be a world with better dental hygiene, too.

The health angle is a strong one and the healthcare industry knows it. "Insurance companies are really trying to figure out how to reinvent all this stuff," Web 2.0 forefather and sensor-lover Tim O'Reilly told me about Green Goose today. "They're all looking for things like this that will drive wellness. The biggest question about it is whether it's too early. As the old VC saying goes, being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. But this is defiitely on the right track."

The Launch conference Grand Jury members on stage tonight thought so too. Shervin Pishevar and Jay Levy each said on stage that they'd put in $50,000 investments (pending due diligence), after host Calacanis and the crowd cheered louder and louder at the prospect of their doing so.

Calacanis had to admit that the conference's front line selection committee made a mistake when it neglected to select Green Goose to present at the main event. Fortunately Grand Jury members found, selected and promoted the company from the demo platform tables out in the hallway. They'll leave much happier birds.

A little over six weeks out and already everybody's talking about what company will break out at this year's SXSW Interactive. There's been a lot of talk about apps like GroupMe, Beluga and Fast Society, which all make group communication quick and easy, but what about talking to people who you don't already know?

Enter Yobongo, the iPhone app that "makes it super fun and easy to chat with people nearby." Today, the company is launching into private beta and ReadWriteWeb readers will get priority access after the jump.

It is clear to us that there will emerge new ways to communicate as a result of the proliferation of always connected location aware mobile devices. We have not seen anything truly new created yet, imagined from the ground up, that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of these new mobile devices. We believe Yobongo will be a new way to communicate and share with people nearby from your mobile device.

According to the current landing page, using the app is as simple as opening it up. "There aren't rooms to select, friends to find, or people to follow. We magically connect you to the conversation that's happening around you."

Elston explained that they've taken a different approach than other location apps with Yobongo and that it isn't just about where you are.

Our algorithm takes into account all of the users who are in the app and where they are in relation to each other. When a new user opens the app, we determine which people to put them with based on various heuristics.  Unlike many location services, we think the organizing principle should be around people, not GPS coordinates. The room algorithm is dynamic, so less dense areas will still have a positive experience. Therefore we target a manageable number of people per conversation.

In order to avoid abuse by users hiding behind Internet anonymity, Yobongo will allow users to sign in using Facebook Connect or to create a Yobongo account. Elston explains that they will check all accounts for legitimate names and photos, similar to how Facebook does, saying that they believe that "real identity is critical to fostering real communication."

Serendipitous Connections

This certainly isn't the first attempt we've seen at solving the puzzle of serendipitous meetings. Last year, we wrote about a service called Meet Gatsby that approached a similar problem. The idea behind it was simple - you listed your interests and, whenever you checked in using Foursquare, if someone else had recently checked in nearby and had similar interests, it would text you. In theory, it sounded great, but in practice I (for one) found at that a whole lot of people like bikes, beer and the Internet. Now, listing these general interests may have been my fault, but it's also not necessarily the case that with every Foursquare check-in you're looking to make a new friend. With Yobongo, you only open the app with the express intent of chatting and potentially meeting with complete strangers in relative proximity.

So, where do we actually see Yobongo getting used? At something like SXSW, there are a thousand crowded rooms full of people who may or may not actually have something to say to each other. At times, it can feel like you're a ball in a pinball machine, as you bounce from one person to another. Perhaps Yobongo could help act as that initial filter. Rather than talking to whoever catches your eye or happens to be standing in the same line, Yobongo could help connect you with someone who shares similar interests or intentions.

Outside of techie events like SXSWi, Yobongo could be useful in a variety of situations. The group dynamic could make it easier to make initial contact with strangers and find out if there's any reason to go beyond chatting in an iPhone app. With something like Foursquare, your only real choice is a face-to-face interaction. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten to play with it yet, so it's all speculation, but we're looking forward to seeing how it works.

Elston has offered priority access to ReadWriteWeb readers and the first invites should be sent out today.

Wolfram and his team will chronicle the launch in a live webcast on justin.tv, which will start at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern tonight. We are not quite sure how Wolfram will manage the gradual launch over the weekend, though we assume that if you are on the preview waiting list, you will get first dibs.

Some Things to Keep in Mind

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you start experimenting with Alpha tonight or over the weekend:

• Wolfram Alpha is not a general purpose search engine - it does not directly compete with Google and if you treat it like Google, you will inevitably be disappointed.
• Check out the copious examples from the home page - they will give you a good idea of the type of queries that Alpha can handle best.
• Here is one thing we can almost guarantee: you will be disappointed at first (especially if you were expecting a Google killer).

  Alpha is a great tool, but it takes some time to learn its limits and strengths. Unlike Google, some searches simply don't return any results at all.

Using Alpha

Once you get access to Alpha, here are some tips for how to structure your searches and searches you should try:

• If Alpha doesn't give you the results you are looking for, try a different way of phrasing the query - sometimes even capitalization can make a difference!
• Try to search for anything that can be packed into data snippets (height of a mountain, chemical formulas, population stats, stars, planets, etc.) .
• Try combining two searches. Alpha usually does a great job with these kind of queries.
• Feed it some math problems. The fact that Alpha is based on Mathematica really shines through here.
• Do some test searches for food items or drugs.
• Let it solve some word puzzles for you. Just head to the "Words & Linguistics" section for some good examples.
• If you're a sports fan, look up some baseball or football stats: "passing touchdowns Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos."

Our Wolfram Alpha resources

Screenshots: See Wolfram Alpha in Action

Our Preview: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions

Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but it's quite different from Google and other search engines. Indeed, maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call itself a "computational knowledge engine"). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to New York City, for example, Alpha, from what we've seen so far, will not be able to help you.

Our Review: Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha

At the end of the day, Wolfram Alpha is a tool; and once you take some time to learn its ways, it can become a very powerful tool. While a lot of media outlets have compared Alpha to Google, we think that this is a moot question. Alpha simply doesn't want to be a Google killer and, in its current form, won't take market share away from Google. As we reported in our first look at Alpha a few weeks ago, Alpha will take away some users from Wikipedia (but it's no Wikipedia killer either), as it can give those users quick and easy access to a wide range of data.

For now, we expect Alpha to remain a niche player. It will be a highly valuable tool for a small subset of potential users. Though, hopefully, over time the team will add more and better databases to draw information from so that Alpha will become more useful to a mainstream audience as well.

Videos

Stephen Wolfram's screencast demo of Alpha.

First Public Demo of Wolfram Alpha at the Berkman Center:

Stephen Wolfram and colleagues discuss the launch preparations:

Setting up the Wolfram Alpha data center (one of five W|A data centers):

Other Wolfram Alpha Reviews

Technology Review (compares Alpha to Google):

Generally, I did not use search terms that clearly had no computable answer (and therefore would have stumped Wolfram). But I also didn't throw any softballs in areas close to the heart of its makers: physics, chemistry, engineering, and genomics. On hard-core scientific questions, it gives you tons of symbols and graphics and other information that would be useful to a researcher but obscure to most people. But on many common questions for which there is no obvious data element, you will not get much help. In any event, if its plans hold, you should be able to test it out yourself in two or three weeks.

Search Engine Land (very in-depth look):

Wolfram Alpha's edge may be that it's a unique repository of general knowledge that imitates a search engine (unlike Wikipedia, which has no search engine feel). Of course, the killer combination would be for Wolfram Alpha to be partnered with a major search engine. It's something Wolfram said is being considered, though there are no formal discussions at the moment. The focus is really getting the service opened to the public and seeing how the initial reaction goes.

Telegraph:

How many times have you used to the internet to calculate the answer to a simple mathematical problem, for help with calculus, or for information on the GDP of Gibraltar? If the answer's, "not often", then it's going to be quite some time before Wolfram Alpha crops up as your search engine of choice.

What Will You Ask?

If you are looking forward to the launch of Wolfram Alpha, let us know what questions you want to ask in the comments. We'll try to answer the most interesting questions (try to give us specific queries!) with links to screenshots from the Wolfram Alpha preview in the comments until about 3pm PST today.

Another interesting fact about the downstream clicks from Twitter is that very few users go from Twitter.com to retail, business, or finance sites.

Here are a few other interesting findings:

• after visiting Twitter.com, more users visit Etsy.com, the marketplace for buying all things handmade, than Amazon
• in terms of downstream clicks, CNN.com is the most popular news service on Twitter
• Yahoo Mail gets more downstream clicks than Gmail or Windows Live Mail

One caveat about this data that Hitwise does not mention, however, is that a large number of Twitter users never even visit Twitter.com because they use more fully-featured desktop or mobile clients like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or Tweetie. Hitwise obviously doesn't have access to this data, but it would be interesting to see if those Twitter users who use a Twitter client exhibit a different behavior compared to those who use the web site.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

It's notable as well that Hulu didn't build its own social network from scratch. That would have been a waste of resources. Instead it is leveraging already established social networks elsewhere.

The most important consequence of the announcement may be that the OAuth protocol used to securely access social networking data without requesting a user's password is now being placed in front of millions more people than it has been before. That's good news.

Concerns About Hulu Friends

On the other hand, it's sad that the OpenID community remains small enough to be left out in the cold by Hulu. In theory the site should be able to add an OpenID login button to its list and pull in standard Friend of a Friend data from any identity provider at all.

Barb Dybwad at Obsessable wonders whether Hulu Friends is actually a reason for Hulu to be less "friendly" with other social video platforms that want to play Hulu content in their communities - specifically Boxee.

Finally, we're concerned that Hulu Friends isn't being featured very prominently on the site. It takes a few too many clicks to get to the friend syncing page on Hulu. We're not seeing Hulu activity pushed out to social network activity streams, either. In fact, it looks like Hulu is using the legacy Facebook API, not the fancy new Facebook Connect. Is the company being overly cautious about Hulu Friends? If they are, its limited adoption could become a self fulfilling prophecy.

All in all, though, we feel positive about Hulu Friends. We hope the company innovates on top of the idea and makes more moves towards integration with the open web.