Calacanis Talk At Blog Business Summit in Seattle

Hey, I thought Jason did a wonderful REAL speech this morning as the keynote. Tris Hussey has a good blog post on it. And here is Jason's take on it and info about his new podcast.

Parts of the speech were hilarious, parts were spot on with his anger and frustration over dumb blogosphere phenomena (pay-per-post companies for instance) but mostly it was wonderful in giving a perspective to where this blogging culture started, where and how and why it began and where it is now and where it's going.

I really liked the way he reminded us how blogging started in an atmosphere of a nearly dead economy in the early 2000's ... the way the business slump and dot com crash had brought us all to our knees, how we were all sick of hype and hypesters, how bloggers wanted to stop the spin, just tell the truth and be transparent. So many of us had nothing, no jobs, no money and nothing to lose. It was a backlash to the booming 1990's. It was a "misfit" culture as he explained and that was what was rare and precious and creative about it.

He explained how he "got" and respected bloggers and when AOL wanted to buy his company, Weblogs, Inc. he insisted on a NO-EDIT-BLOGS and HANDS-OFF-THE-BLOGGERS attitude from the beginning. He was right. He also did a hilarious impersonation of Nick Denton. But let's leave that alone. Great speech. Just great.