"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.

Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.

According to news posted on Accentuate in mid-September, and more recently on blog sites Pulse2 and The Next Web, the potential Mahalo lawsuit involves disputes surrounding a change to the site's terms, which now give the company ownership of the content published on Mahalo.com. Prior to the change, the writers also owned the content. This change angered some of the site's users, who are now attempting to sue the company.

The law firm of Green Welling, LLP is currently gathering information from affected writers and attempting to get a class-certified suit underway.

Mahalo employees and contractors interested in participating in the suit are being asked for any "information, documentation, screen captures, emails, other communications or experiences with Mahalo.com," notes Accentuate Services, a blog dedicated to freelancing and fiction writing. The site is maintained by Michelle L. Devon, one of the injured parties, and now the plaintiff in the suit. Those joining her can remain anonymous through attorney-client privilege, she says.

The details of the case itself are not currently being discussed, but it involves revenue sharing disputes and intellectual property law from our understanding of the matter. Devon was previously seen commenting on this thread on Mahalo Answers, the Q&A sub-section of the search site. Additional discussion is also available online in dedicated forum sites both here and here.

Note: Mahalo has not yet responded to our request for comment regarding the suit. We will update this post if we hear back.Update: Mahalo's official comment: "We're not going to speculate on rumors of lawsuits. However, our terms of service have been and continue to be clear. We've always operated under Creative Commons. Under the prior terms of service, the writers owned the content and provided Mahalo with a license to use it. Now that we compensate writers with bi-weekly cash payments, we amended the terms so that we own the content and provide the writers a creative commons license to use elsewhere if they choose. Bottom line is that Mahalo is pro-writer, as evidenced by our substantial and ever-growing investment in quality content. Our Mahalo Guides and Gurus are talented, passionate, creative contributors who are the lifeblood of the site. Writers interested in sharing their passions with a huge audience of readers should not hesitate to apply."

Calacanis Working on TechCrunch Competitor Called "Launch"

As the different parties investigate a potential suit against Mahalo, it seems Calacanis has a new project. According to an article in today's Guardian, the entrepreneur is now investing in an editorial startup called Launch.

Launch will take on TechCrunch, says Calacanis, but with more of a focus on "quality and insight," he says. "When I started with [Engadget founder, and Joystiq, Gizmodo and Hackaday co-founder] Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight," he said. "Now it's even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility."

Launch won't offer news via blog posts, as TechCrunch does, though. It will be provided as an email newsletter - the same format where Calacanis's own deeper insights disappeared to back in 2008.

"If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it's the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog," he told the Guardian.

Do Bloggers Lack Credibility?

As bloggers ourselves, it's hard to not be stung by words like his. Bloggers lack credibility? Ouch.

But blogging, let's remember, is just a format for publishing content. Anyone can blog, from mainstream journalists to uninformed amateurs. That's the power and the beauty of the platform, in fact. Who exactly is Calacanis speaking about when he makes comments like these?

Besides, today's blog readers are now savvier than ever, often interacting with writers through comment forms and on the social networks Twitter and Facebook, which he summarily dismissed. Commenters add their thoughts to posted stories, expressing their support or agreement, pointing out mistakes or offering different opinions or opposing points of views.

While an email newsletter will arguably have a highly engaged audience, as Calacanis says, it's hardly positioned as a direct competitor to TechCrunch, or any other top-tier news site, blog or otherwise.

But that's just my opinion, as a lowly blogger.

In the comments (or elsewhere), you can share yours. That's how this works, folks. And we like it.

Photo by Joi Ito.

Suite101 is a relatively low profile site compared to the others mentioned above. Yet it produces 500 new pieces of content per day. I spoke to Suite101 CEO Peter Berger to discuss why it produces so much content, how it compares to Demand Media, and what Google is doing about content farms.

Suite101 is a publishing platform that hosts articles about niche topics. As its name implies, Suite101 focuses on '101' style writing - beginners articles on thousands of topics. Berger described Suite101 as "a service to help writers be successful online." It currently has 5,000 active writers and four different language sites. The biggest of these is the english language .com site, which he said currently has 24 million unique visitors a month.

In a search on Google, Suite101 came up with 6.5 million pages on the Web. That isn't far behind About.com, with 8.29 million. It isn't on the same level though (in terms of quantity) as Demand Media - which at last estimate pumps out 7,000 new articles every day (it was 4,000 back in November). At that rate, Demand Media is probably producing upwards of 2.5 million new pieces of content per year.

Eating The Lunch of Traditional Publishers

Berger said that the name of the game in this space is SEO: writing content "that search engines want to present their users." Like the Demand Media CEO when I questioned him about their business model, Berger claimed that his company's model is not competing with traditional journalism. Rather, Berger said that Suite101 and others compete with "non-fiction publishing."

For example, he said, in the past if you were re-modeling your house you'd go buy a book on that subject. But now, people just Google it. He claimed that traditional publishers have "not woken up [to this] at all."

I asked what traditional publishers could do to 'wake up'? Berger replied that there has been "no response from publishing houses" to topic-based sites like Suite101. The best that traditional publishers have come up with, said Berger, is ebooks. However "the questions of the users are so much more specific" than what ebooks can address, he continued. "What rules in this space is topic expertise" - which he noted is what Suite101 is a platform for.

Demand Media vs. Google

So is Suite101 worried about the sheer scale that Demand Media is working at and that they may dominate this space? Berger thinks that Demand Media is only interested in the "commercially lucrative space" and not the "more niche subjects" that Suite101 covers.

What's more, Berger believes that Google is a threat to Demand Media's business model: "Google is best at solving problems algorithmically."

"Finding niche requirements is becoming a commodity," he continued, "and Google - not Demand Media - is best placed to master that space."

What he means by that is that Demand Media has sophisticated software for identifying what content is 'in demand' on the Web (hence its name). But Google owns the dominant search engine, where millions of people go to search for content. So Google is in a position of power over Demand Media - its options include open sourcing the mechanism for identifying what content is needed on the Web (thus denying Demand Media its main competitive advantage), or it could change its PageRank algorithm to better account for quality over quantity (which based on what I've heard, is already happening).

The New New Agriculture

Suite101 doesn't seem concerned with Demand Media vs Google. Berger says that Suite101 is focused instead on writers. He sees his company eventually moving beyond "professionalised niche writing" and becoming a "personal brand builder for qualified individuals." In other words, a place where subject matter experts can come to share their expertise.

Multiply this over hundreds of thousands of niche topics, and it's a potentially valuable business. But highly competitive - because others like Mahalo, About.com and Associated Content are also farming the Web for the big bucks.

When Mahalo first launched, my instinctive reaction (which I recorded on my personal Blog) was that this was "old wine in new bottles". Traditional publishers have been doing "human powered search" even BI (Before Internet) but these went by boring names like Directory. Human editors work great in well defined niches, always have done and always will. Human editors produce the expert content that Google finds for you. This is long tail publishing. This is Business Media and Enthusiast Media, large but slow growth traditional publishing segments of the media industry.

But an Internet scale venture powered by humans rather than software? We look at three reasons why this might work and two reasons why it won't work.

Three Pros And Two Cons

Most ventures in this space highlight three things that a human editor can always do better than a software program. These are the three Pros:

1. Spam control. Humans can easily spot even the most ingenious spam .

2. Duplicate control. 10 articles that all say virtually the same thing are just a waste of time.

3. Disambiguation. Computers need an awful lot of expensive programming to always spot the difference between "apple" as a fruit, a consumer electronics company or a record label. Humans can do it in a flash.

The two Cons:

1. You cannot persuade people to break their Google habit until your searches are better than Google for most cases (not just the few cases where you specialize). This massive hurdle is true for all search engines.

2. You cannot win as a destination site if you are general purpose. You go to the sites that specialize in the areas that interest you. If you don't know what sites to go to, Google will find those sites for you.

So, do three Pros beat two Cons? Not in this case. The Pros are three relatively minor irritants that human powered search fixes. The Cons are total showstoppers.

Pay People To Write Content?

Mahalo pays people to create content. That means they can predict the quality of the results. Paying people requires lots of funding. Mahalo has plenty of funding and it is unlikely anybody else will get funded with the same model. So Mahalo has a fairly long and clear runway before take-off. Mahalo is private company so we don't know how long it will take them to get to profitability or even if the basic economics make profitability feasible at all. In today's climate, nobody will buy Mahalo without a clear path to profitability.

Are you Bullish or Bearish on Mahalo? Cast your vote in our Company Index (powered by TradeVibes). My vote was Bearish and I was in the majority at the time I cast my vote (80% Bullish vs 20% Bearish). The sample size on that vote was too low to be meaningful (40), so the more votes the better.

The Elephant In The Community Generated Content Room

Most other ventures get "the community" to create the content. The elephant in this room is of course Wikipedia. How on earth do you get general knowledge content that is better at scale than Wikipedia? How do you motivate people to create content if, unlike Mahalo, you are not paying their salaries? Google's answer with Knol was to pay them indirectly via Adsense revenue. The market jury on Knol is still out. If Google cannot win, how can any other start-up without their brand power? If the Knol competitor also monetizes through Adsense, their margin is even less.

About The Players

The other well funded venture that wears the human powered search label is Wikia. Founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame, this looks like the largest pure Wiki style venture. Content is community generated, but it appears that they have editors/moderators/curators on payroll.

Squidoo looks like a bootstrapped venture. It is hard to tell if it has traction. Looking at Squidoo's page on TradeVibes will point to many other inexpensive Wiki style ventures. The basic technology of Wikis is now a total commodity.

One of the earliest ventures, About.com, is now owned by the New York Times. On my survey of one, About is the one site other than Wikipedia that surfaces a lot in general knowledge type searches. At the scale they operate, it may well be profitable. So Mahalo, Wiki and other human powered search engines may have a bright future.

What do you think? Can general purpose human powered search engines scale and make money? Or will they either fail or move into small niches? What new ventures have a fundamentally differentiated approach to this market?

Antitrust is a lumbering beast and ineffective in fast moving technology markets. Historically, by the time it lumbers into action, the cycle is starting to move against the incumbent anyway. That happened with both IBM and Microsoft.

I have already written about the danger of a Google monoculture; and was flamed by people who thought I was being alarmist. Slowly-boiled frogs seldom get alarmed until it is too late. The launch of Knol has turned up the heat enough to alarm some more people.

Specifically, the issue with Knol is: how much Google tunes their search algorithm to favor Knol content vs alternative content on the same subject? This is where Google could be crossing the line. This is not so far from Microsoft bundling Explorer in order to beat Netscape.

Mahalo and Squidoo - Roadkill?

The companies that are most at threat are those like Mahalo and Squidoo, i.e. semi-automated aggregation plays. These appealed to VCs because they are more scalable than pure-play content. This market appeals to Google for the same reason. Mahalo, Squidoo and others are in the way and the steamroller is coming. They had better be really agile to get out of the way. They look like roadkill to me.

Google may make more money for individual content creators than they can make from Mahalo, Squidoo or alternatives. So Google will get the popular vote and that may be enough to forestall antitrust action.

However, even individual content creators may want to think twice. With Google providing both the content platform and the revenue, it feels a little bit like a medieval landowner who can change the rules on the peasants when it appeals to them. Of course Google would never be so evil as to exercise their “droit du seigneur“, but why put them in a position where they might be tempted?

The Google Threat to Content Creators

Anybody who employs content creators is certainly sensible to wonder when Google will re-define content in such a way that their business is threatened.

Content creators - whether the individuals or their employers - increasingly rely on either WordPress or MT. Google’s Blogger is a distant third. Both have powerful plugin architectures. There is good open source Wiki code out there. What does it take to create a Knol-like “persistent community content” plugin for WordPress and MT? That looks pretty simple technically. Maybe its already out there, riding below the hype radar. It would fit the author-moderated model of a blogger or Blog network. It adds persistent content (read “more page views”). It gets away from reliance on feeding the reverse chronological mill.

Then use OpenX rather than Google Ad Manager. And Piwik rather than Google Analytics. Bingo, it’s declaration of independence for content creators and their employers.

Mahalo pages are collections of the most useful links regarding a wide variety of timely topics in popular niches. I find the idea of curating a collection of content over time fascinating. On each page at Mahalo you can suggest links, grab the OPML file for all the feeds on a page and even get a Firefox plug-in to take Mahalo everywhere you go. I know it's not hip to like Mahalo in tech circles, but I do.

Critics say that Mahalo will never scale like an automated index can, to which the company argues that it's only serving the bulk of popular search queries, not the long tail of search. Link selection is also very arbitrary - but I find Mahalo a good place to start learning about many topics. Other things I look up in Wikipedia first, it just depends on the topic.

The graph above shows the percentage of US internet traffic Hitwise saw going through Mahalo. It's graphed against stillborn competitor Cha Cha. Likewise, Mahalo could go the way of Squidoo, another human curated reference site that seems to have devolved into spam and irrelevance.

The page about the DataPortability Workgroup, for example, is on the Mahalo front page under Technology right now. Aren't you curious what the most pertinent links about that much-discussed group might be? I looked it up out of interest more than to learn about the group, but I've used the site to learn the basics about many non-tech topics in the news. I didn't know there was a conflict between Iranian and US Navy ships this week, but I found all kinds of articles and videos about the topic on the Mahalo page.

While tech and news are my topics of choice, Hitwise reports that most outbound traffic from Mahalo is destined for Entertainment (37%) and News and Media (19%) sites. I wouldn't be surprised if Mahalo's success continues.