Sam Harrelson broke the story over at ReveNews that Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, has been confirmed as the keynote for this winter’s Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, NV (February 24 to 26, 2008 at the Rio Hotel and Casino).
He must have received notice of that via email or twitter, because the official Affiliate Summit blog does not report anything yet. It does not surprise me though, because I can imagine how busy the Affiliate Summit staff is now, because of the first Summit in jolly old England, which is currently being held in London.
That will be an interesting keynote. Considering Jason’s history and opinion about search engine optimization, which Is also an important subject for affiliate marketers, am I eager to hear what nice things he might has to say about the industry that is infected with adware, email spam, trademark abuse and typo-squatting hehe.
I remember the keynote conversation with Danny Sullivan at SES Chicago 2006. “SEO is bulls$#@!” is how Barry spelled out what Jason actually said in his keynote transcript for Search Engine Roundtable.
[SEJ actually covered this first, but nice citations for SERoundtable 🙂 – Loren]
You can download the audio from the Daily Search Cast web site or watch keynote conversation video on YouTube (three parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3). Search Engine Marketing Gurus made a condensed version of the keynote available for anybody who does not want to spend 40+ minutes watching/listening to the whole thing.
The keynote followed another attack on the SEO industry from his blog, which remains a recurring thing since then. If he really means it or if it is just a marketing trip to draw attention to his own search project Mahalo is not clear, but no matter what the case might be, one thing is sure. Jason did not make many friends in the search engine marketing space since end of last year.
Affiliate marketers are still somewhat neutral when it comes to the opinion about whether or not Jason is a good or bad person. I wonder if that will change next year. If he had that kind words for the SEO industry, which had far less issues than affiliate marketing, I would honestly be surprised if he turns out being an evangelist of performance marketing. I can’t wait to see that.
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet marketing and web development resources portal at Cumbrowski.com for small-business entrepreneurs and corporate marketers.
