Squidoo joins Newsvine in the MLM social news model...

Well I have no idea what a viatim cult is, but I guess I'd join ;)

There's something wrong with his thinking, and it's the reason Sony's going to go broke.

The mainstream is always desperate to find the next "thing", simply because it has no integrity, imagination, or creativity of its own. So it sends out "cool hunters" to find things from the underground to drag up into the shiny shallow world and suck dry. There are a few rare real things which somehow make it in this world, but they're usually walking corpses before long. And they're always followed by a decade of zombie imitations. Meanwhile the underground is usually pretty aware of fakes, and it's generally moved on by the time reality has been plasticised.

This had already happened to the 60s before I was old enough to realise, it happened to punk while I was watching, then dance parties, and it's currently in the process with world music. My next bet would be Dub, by the way... And that's just music - it's the same with everything.

Music and movies (that's why I picked on Sony) are such a good example of this that the mainstream they're turning out now doesn't even have that smell of recent life necessary to keep the mainstream audience interested. It's so tired, so long dead, such a formula of safe and boring, that frankly no one could care less.

And if you "pick the best people and pay them" it's the same as cool hunting. You can reproduce it but it lack context and vitality, and it's soon going to wilt. Corey Spring is cool (go Corey!). Even if he totally moved from Newsvine I wouldn't be moving my "viewing time" to follow him, because it's not just Corey that makes NV it's the whole context and you can't buy it for a thousand dollars a month.

MBA's like Calacanis think what NV is doing is a pyramid scheme, which it's not. It's an effort to honestly spread the (small) income from the site so that "they" aren't getting rich off the efforts of "us" but rather we're all in this together.

Community thinking like that allows the underground to put a tendril into business-space. MBA thinking like Calacanis says Corey's worth more than he's being paid so Calacanis gets rich.

I think Corey's probably worth more than he's being paid too, but I don't think it's going to make Calacanis rich. Mind you Sony hasn't gone broke yet so maybe there's enough people out there who would rather Real-dolls than reality.

I think you're right on Irma, but historically the MBA types need to see red ink to focus on the obvious.

I think the pyramid scheme analogy is a bit inaccurate, mainly because you are only earning 10% of your invitees ad money. That means that you need 9 friends to invite that will contribute as much as you do to just match the 90% of what you earn on what you actually produce. It is much less about a pyramid scheme and much more earning back what your contributions have earned.

Calacanis is just trying to hype his own product which is fine. He thinks his way is best, which is natural, or else he would try a different method. That said, upon learning that they are looking for another five navigators, I did just happen to throw my hat in the ring and sent the man an e-mail.

Some things are worth more than money, but there is a certain contingent of the Suits who look at everything in terms of dollars and cents. On the one hand, Calacanis compares Newsvine to a MLM scheme, and on the other hand, he thinks people are a commodity that can be bought for $1K/mo. (not even a Living Wage). What Jason has done with Netscape is apply a hierarchial structure to the concept, and paying the top appointees, rather than trusting the community to moderate itself, and allow the "cream to rise to the top."

I don't see what Newsvine is doing in quite the same way. I see it as Newsvine allowing each of us to become our own entrepreneurs in terms of how much effort we put into our own columns (which directly effects our shares of the ad revenue-sharing model), our efforts we put into the Newsvine community, and also into helping each other (and as a side effect, the site) to prosper. Columnists at Newsvine succeed or fail on their own efforts in conjunction with a democratic process of community voting, it's a form of earned meritocracy.

Yes, you can get great links and sources if you pay users, but you lose that sense of democratic community, and in some cases you may alienate those who are working just as hard as the Navigators but aren't getting paid, and at the end of the day it's the community that makes these kinds of sites cool (and prosperous).

Here, he says that YouTube is not a real business, while defending Google Video (which does pretty much the same thing as YouTube) because it engages in commerce.

Also since he's the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., he should know better than to allow his employees try to game Digg by driving Weblogs, Inc.'s sites to the top of Digg with their concerted efforts at voting those sites up.

Also keep in mind that AOL, which owns Netscape and Weblogs, Inc., also tried to push the "pay us to deliver your email" model of spam fighting. AOL effectively told the spammers of the world "if you are willing to pay AOL, we'll deliver your mail to our end-users."