Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo (the human-powered search engine) gave one of the best presentations at the Le Web 3.0 conference in Paris which took place from December 11-12, 2007. Jason’s presentation was entitled “Internet Pollution and How to Stop It”. He points out that much of the content on the Internet is spam and is utterly unreliable and downright harmful. From fake blogs (or splogs for spam blogs), search results filed with spam and disguised malware, the Internet has become a giant garbage can instead of the informative, fascinating medium that we thought it would become.

The problem is that people are building products that contribute to Internet pollution when they should be trying to help people weed out the junk (which is what he hopes to achieve with his new search engine called Mahalo).

Jason makes the following points in his presentation:

(1) We all bought into the ideal of a democratic, open Internet. He cites to Usenet as an example, except 15 years after it was created, Usenet groups came the target of the world’s first spam mailing (the green card spam from a law firm). Usenet became polluted shortly after that. Indeed if you go to one of the Usenet groups for travel in Europe, every single entry is spam. Usenet has become unusable; it’s worthless today. The things that make the Internet great: free, open, level playing field, those are the things that make it so easily gamed and destroyed. And it’s not just Usenet.

(2) Search results on Google are also untrustworthy. He showed a slide with search results that point people to a web page that contains malware. If you were to click on them, they would load an ActiveX plugin that would put porn onto your computer. Search is another one of the mediums that about to be destroyed like Usenet. We let all these things be destroyed and we did nothing — we (the entrepreneurs) are all to blame, he says.

(3) The problem is the free, open ecosystem. Seth Godin is a smart guy, a genius at marketing, and a friend, but he created, with good intentions, Squidoo. Much of the content on it is stolen, many of the links are actually affiliate spam, undisclosed “paid” links. How is it that a genius at marketing created a platform for spamming the web? Good intentions. But Seth does not go back and look at what he has done, he does not police what he has made. One cannot build these open platforms, expect it not to be abused, and pretend you do not see the abuse . . . all so you can make money. That is really what’s going on here. A lot of people are pretending they don’t see the abuse and the pollution of the Internet, so they can make money. They’re doing deceptive advertising, they’re spamming the hell out of it.

(4) Dave Sifry (founder of Technorati), who is smart and super nice, and a friend, believed that spam on Technorati could be controlled. Evan Williams, another good friend and the founder of Blogger and Twitter, is a very smart guy. If you go to Technorati and search for Paris hotels, the results are spam. It’s all spam from Blogger sites. So how can Dave Sifry and Ev Williams create systems that are causing massive pollution on the Internet? They’re both not running these things anymore. But these systems are open because if you close them you don’t get as many page views and therefore don’t get as much money. That’s the underlying truth and that’s why people are letting these things progress. This is very short term gain.

You can watch his presentation here: http://www.calacanis.com/2007/12/24/le-web-3-talk/.

The arguments made by Calacanis are similar to those in Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen goes one step further, however, to assert that all this free and “open” stuff is actually ruining culture. Wikipedia, Craigslist and YouTube are the villains in his book.

NEXT WEEK: Is Web 2.0 really ruining culture? A review of Andrew Keen’s book.

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