Update on Paying People to Bookmark (aka "the offer")
Couple of updates on the “paying people to bookmark” brouhaha (aka “Calacanis vs. Rose” or “the offer”)… but first, a special treat. Turns out the 784 lawyers at AOL are reading my blog and they asked me to be extra, extra clear about the offer (and they even wrote these point in my vocie for me–how nice!):
- To qualify, you must be one of our top bloggers on a social news site like Newvine, Delicious, Reddit, etc.
- If you are interested you have to email me at jason at calacanis dot com.
- We will decide in our sole discretion on who we will pick as our 12 social bookmarkers for Netscape. If you’re selected, we’ll follow up with an e-mail to you with our terms. Keep in mind that I’m making this offer for a limited time.
OK, now that we have that over with:
- Kevin Rose, the found of DIGG, respond to my blog post about him dogging me, but he will not address the issue of contributors getting paid seriously. I posted a comment asking him to respond, but he hasn’t (and I don’t think he will frankly).
- Dave Winer, who’s opinion on these issues I respect deeply, checks in on the issue.
- Steven Johnson is gonna speak on the issue at some point…. looking forward to that. SJ is +++.
- Tysonhy, the #1 users on DIGG, is not taking us up on the offer. I respect him for doing bookmarking for the love of it–and when we announce the first five bookmarkers we sign up I hope people respect their right to be paid!
- I started talking with Tyson about it before we launched Netscape (proof that this was not a desperate move like Mike Arrington said on TechCrunch, but rather always part of the plan).
- I talk about the offer with Mike Arrington and the Gillmor Gang on the last two episodes (called Resignation Gang Parts I & II due to Mike Arrington resigning).
- Chris Pirillo talks with Mike Davidson of Newsvine about “the offer.”
- We’ll have an announcement about the first 5-10 Navigators shortly (we’ve got top 10 users from various sites signed up)
- Valleywag has a story about us not offering Navigator positions to current Netscape users. To be clear, we will offer positions to the top Netscape users down the road. The current offer is for folks who have been bookmarking for over six months and who are in the top 10-20 users on a service. Since Netscape is ~30 days old no one on Netscape has been doing it for that long. When Netscape is a couple of months old we’re certainly gonna look at the top 10 and consider paying some of those folks.
