Jason Calacanis really doesn’t get it. I don’t know why I got such a visceral reaction to his post, but I don’t think I was the only one. He basically said that it was “unconscionable” for Wikipedia not to monetize the Wikipedia project.

He called on Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) to put up a leaderboard ad on the site. He claimed it would produce $100M that could help fund other projects. He then suggested that the site have a 25×25 px “Hosting donated by AOL” banner.

Wow. I’m simply stunned at how somebody can be so blinded by his own hubris. Last month I enjoyed hearing Kevin Rose’s speech in which he talked about his stance against paying top Digg contributors. I agree 100% that once you introduce money into the equation, it can undermine the entire community.

People smarter than myself have torn the Calcanis post apart, and rightly so. There are just so many problems with his assumptions. He also doesn’t seem to understand that not everything is about money – that people might value community and a shared purpose. And maybe this lack of understanding is what makes for such an interesting chart (comparing the traffic between Netscape and Digg):

And moreover, this:

It looks like the Calacanis camp (AOL and Netscape) needs more advice than the people behind Wikipedia and Digg.

I love Borat. I’ve enjoyed all of Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters on Ali-G for years. However, I’m getting a bit sick of all the Borat stuff I’ve seen on Digg, YouTube, etc. There is a limited set of jokes in Borat’s repertoire and I’m beginning to grow tired of the same lines over and over again (just different contexts). It seems like a case of “too much of a good thing” and it reminds me of what happened with Mike Meyer’s Austin Powers back in 1999.

In ‘97 I saw the first Austin Powers and thought it was a truly original, funny film. But as the character’s popularity grew, it became sickeningly over-commercialized. Everybody started reducing the character to a few “one liners”. The Heineken commercial was the straw for me.

If you look at the recently Dugg (yet another) Borat video, you’ll see it’s actually put out by TMZ/AOL and feels a lot like “hey, isn’t this cool? but first, watch a candy bar commercial” No, it was cool when the character was genuine. The brilliance of Borat was his disarming, awkward personality, offensive language, AND the responses he would get from his interviewees. He was a disarming character who brought out people’s bigotry, ignorance, and the like - that was funny. It was funny partly because it was sad - it was humor interspersed with social commentary.

Now that the Borat movie is out, it seems like he has become the commercial whore that Austin Powers became back in 1999 and even more so in 2002. I don’t want to come across like a snob - if more people see Borat and it makes them laugh - great. It’s just that to an old fan like myself - a certain innocence has been lost forever. I once dressed up as Borat on Halloween, but now that everyone will be doing it (I’m sure), it’s just not the same. I can’t blame things for getting over-commercialized but once people reduce a character to “hey, say that one tagline everyone knows, ” the character loses its edginess. And I like edginess.

I believe we are fast approaching the death of the stock photography market (ar at least as we know it). For a very long time companies like Getty, Jupitermedia, and Corbis have held a tight grip on the entire stock photo market. Marketing companies, designers, and media shops would search their massive databases of photos and then pay large licensing fees to use the photos they wanted for print, web, and advertising. Most of these licenses were rather restrictive.

Well, that was before everyone had a digital camera and before the internet made it so easy to share photography.

Several years ago, a small startup by the name of iStockPhoto was launched with a revolutionary idea: let anyone register, contribute photos, and allow them to upload and download royalty-free images and illustrations on a profit-sharing basis.

The iStockPhoto idea took off and designers like myself were very happy to contribute some of our work and use some of the proceeds to get other people’s photos for our own designs. Since then the company has grown tremendously - they’ve added many more features, licensing options, etc. The photo prices also increased.

Getty Images bought out iStockPhoto in February of this year for $50M. Getty is now faced with trying to balance their old-school (and very profitable) stock photo model with the wildy successful (and less profitable) iStockPhoto model. One has obviously been cannibalizing the other.

As hardware costs and barriers to entry are diminishing online, there’s nothing stopping more companies like iStockPhoto from launching. As a matter of fact it’s inevitable. With the current monetization models out there, it seems like you could very well run a free stock photo site and make it successful. The challenge (as it always is) is reaching critical mass, but if you have a good strategy, it can be done.

In 2004, Flickr added Creative Commons (CC) licensing options to photos contributed by their users. In 2005 Flickr added a Creative Commons search to their database as well. As Flickr’s user base grew, so did the number of searchable photos licensed under different CC options.

As John Batelle recently pointed out, there are now 22M photos licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr. I’m actually planning on licensing my own photos under a non-commercial attribution license. Last week a Brazilian publisher emailed my girlfriend asking permission to use one of her Flickr photos in a textbook her company was producing. Since it was for a good cause (education), she obliged.

Getting permission to use Flickr photos (unless it’s already given via CC) is much smarter than paying massive royalties to Getty or any other large old-school photo aggregator who then ends up splitting the proceeds with the artist.

Flickr and other services that make it easy to search large databases of photos and contact the photographers directly are far more cheaper and efficient than the old system. The stock photography oligopoly is being replaced with socially distributed systems and I’m happy about it. More people will see my work, I’ll be able to get the work of others more easily - everyone wins! (Well, almost everyone).

Well, not really - but it might as well be. Squidoo is Seth Godin’s web 2.0 redheaded stepchild. It’s a user-generated experiment gone bad. The basic premise is that anyone can create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster” of a page about anything they want or are passionate about.

But lately the only time I hear Squidoo mentioned is when somebody talks about parasite SEO or ways to get easy trusted one-way links. About five months back Techcrunch blasted Squidoo. There are just so many problems with the Squidoo concept once reality sets in. Here’s a few notable ones:

1. Most non-seo’s probably build a page and never come back to it. There is just nothing to come back for. The site is 0% sticky.
2. Once someone claims a lens it’s theirs. This means there’s a crapload of really empty pages that will just stay that way because of point #1 and nobody will fix them. It’s like wikipedia without the wiki or the pedia.
3. The whole payment/revenue-share concept is ridiculousy complicated and confusing - how the money splits before and after expenses, what those expenses are, how much of it goes to charity and under what circumstances, etc. They even have trouble explaining it themselves.
4. The children in a Bangladeshi sweatshop earn more than the top Squidoo lensmasters. The highest payouts (if you work really hard and promote it) go all the way up into the low 2 figures range. Cha ching!
5. Even their best content (Top 100) is utterly useless and complete crap. I sure hope the Magic of Harry Wong makes it into the top 10 to overtake Chocolate Obsessions. (Did John Mark Karr shadowrite the “Wong” lens?) I’ve seen content on scraper sites that puts Squidoo content to shame.
6. Visually the whole site looks like a bunch of IRS agents decided to create their own Friendster, but with instead of writing, they scraped a bunch of articles from a network of grandma blogs. The visuals on the site are really bland and the users have no control over layout or style.

So I went ahead and created a new lens called Spamdoo. Do me a favor and go give it 5 stars. I want to see just how easy it is to move up the “most popular” rank. This is assuming the editors don’t get offended and remove it before you read this.

Last year an early-20-something couple came to my door promoting the Sierra Club. I signed up, but only because 1. they were not smelly hippies as I would have imagined 2. I felt sorry for their door-to-door hustling ways in the hot Florida sun, and 3. I kind of like nature.

My membership card in hand, I felt like a responsible citizen of the world.

In the coming months, however, I started receiving Sierra Club magazines and other literature, which I found REALLY ironic - preaching a message via dead trees - the very thing they are trying to protect. This had bothered me for quite some time - I NEVER read crap I get in the mail and I always hate seeing so much paper get wasted - I recycle, but I know not everyone does. Besides, recycling is still not as good as “never using the damn tree to begin with”.

A few months ago the Sierra people started calling my cell phone. I never really wanted to talk to them so I always got off the phone pretty fast. But after a number of tries I got pretty fed up with them trying to get me to donate. I told them to take me off every one of their lists, including the mailing list.

I may have stuck around longer, but I really get the feeling the a lot of money donated to the Sierra Club goes towards supporting the machine that is the Sierra Club. If anyone knows of a site with stats of “how much of your money actually goes to help and how much goes to administrative expenses”, please drop me a link in the comments.

Sorry Sierra Club. You just lost a member.