My real concern with his response is the differentiation between “making your sites better for search engines” and “[optimizing] their sites for humans”. He is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, casting off all of the good elements that have come out of SEO, such as search engine friendly URL’s (which, BTW, are also much friendlier to humans), etc.

I can tell you one thing for certain: based on his less-than-professional (to put it mildly) response to your review, I will be very cautious about using any products with the name Jason Calacanis attached.

BTW – It’s obvious you’re not from the south. “y’all” only has one “a” in it. :)

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Wacky Labs — This is supposed to look like a sig!

More about this to come later tonight most likely.

Y'all is the common spelling from the deep south. Transplanters use the ya'all to offer the combo of the NY'er "ya" plus the south "all" in a descriptive. The basis is unknown but appears to have started when some Yankee fans visited a Waffle House for some smothered covered.

mahalo for your feedback!

jason

1. Search or directory? We’re a hybrid. We have a category system so folks can use the directory approach, but we present our results like search engine results. However, our pages have a peer/audience review model, so we’re sort of like delicious/digg too. For this reason I think you might want to use the term “search service.” Of course, this is ALPHA… you’re only seeing a fraction of what we have planned.

2. AboutUs seems to be a directory of people and places… we’re more of a search result. Also, they let anyone edit the page while we maintain the page with feedback and debate (on the message boards). I think it’s two very different things. AboutUs seems more like WhoIs or Spock–I think AboutUs might be something we link to frankly.

3. Sustainability. Well, people told me that Weblogs, Inc. would not be sustainable four years ago. However, we hit 300 bloggers and 10,000+ blog posts a month. We did that with very little resources. We have much deeper resources now so we will have no problem getting from 4,000 to 10,000 to 25,000 results–it will just take a LOT of time. That is why I funded the company so deeply. Additionally, we hope the audience will help us make these page better. Take a look at the Twitter or Apple SeRP and you’ll see the public is already sending in quality links.

4. Are we an SEO master? If Google wants to index us well that’s fine with us, but our model is not based on being well indexed in Google or Yahoo. Our model is in creating human curated search results that are very helpful to users. Compare the product to the product and let me know what you think. Compare iPhone, Paris Hotels, Pizza, and Flatpanel TV on Mahalo to those same searches on google, yahoo, ask, msn, and wikipedia. That is what this is really about… not these other issues.

now if they were to create a toolbar that somehow tracked what links you thought were useful to your search term on other search engines and added that data(once it had been quailfied as not span) it could be quite neat.