Just as Clinton's right hand man and one-time anointed successor is telling anyone who will listen about the need for change and curation of the ecosystem, so the VP many tipped to follow Jonathan Miller to the top of AOL is shouting about pollution on the Internet and a website climate crisis.

Both are arguing for a change in direction, driven by a growing frustration with the status quo - and, of course, by healthy business pespects.

Jason Calacanis has been described as many things, but an eco-warrior is possibly not one of them. But standing in front of an audience at the NMK Forum in London this morning to deliver an address on social media, he spoke of, "the crisis we're facing on the Internet." The Internet, he says, "Used to be synonymous with intelligence, with good, with helping people. Today, those are not exactly the words people would use. Spam, Splogs, deception - all those nasty words spring to mind pretty quickly. I want to talk about how we can fix that."

What follows is an impassioned talk where the room of marketeers, techies and self-proclaimed media gurus were rallied to the cause of Internet conservation. "It's a standard model that we see. A new medium emerges. Consumers embrace it, marketers over pollute it. Consumers reject that, and the medium either survives in conflict or is killed off. A pretty good example of that is email. Email is a great tool, but it's ruined for marketing now." The not-so-subtext is that if no one stands up to fix it now, we're all screwed.

So, fixing it
Talking to Calacanis about the subject is like speaking to a man possessed. He is a guy that genuinely believes that the web is broken and desperately wants to fix it. "Think about the level of absurdity our industry has come to. Today, we build websites, not for humans, but to make them appeal to machines. Tens of thousands of people spending time making websites better for machines, for Google - it's a sci-fi nightmare gone wrong. Search engines have encouraged this, and the pollution we see right now is partly due to them. You only have to search for a product, or a health condition, or your next vacation to discover that SEOs are ruining the web. If you create an open system, like Google, and let people do what they want, it will be abused. That's what Technorati is doing now - because they index everything and anything, they promote garbage, so there's an incentive for people to keep creating it."

Which isn't to say that search is totally broken. "Search advertising," he enthuses, "Is the greatest advertising ever created in the history of mankind. When people type in a search term, not only do you know that they're interested in that term, you know that they're interested in it right now. That's massive."

His attempt to fix what is wrong with search and the amount of 'pollution' on the internet led Jason to create Mahalo, launched last month, a human powered search engine whose tagline is - "We're here to help." His enthusiasm for search advertising points towards where he expects to make money - and serious amounts of it, too. Forty full time Editors are hand-writing 500 search engine results pages a week, with the aim of indexing the top 25% of English language searches, an area that Calacanis estimates makes up 80-90 per cent of the search advertising market (a market that, itself, could eclipse TV advertising in size before the year is out, says citizen media guru Dan Gillmor). That a human-powered search engine is superior to a machine algorithm is self-evident to him - "Of the seven top results for the Paris Hotels page on Mahalo, just one of them appears in the top forty Google results for the same term. Why? Because slimebucket SEOs have polluted our web."

The slimebuckets
Hailing from Brooklyn, Mahalo's outspoken CEO is not one to mince words, as I discover. During the course of the presentation, and our conversation afterwards, he refers not just to slimebuckets, but also to gamers, abusers, fakers, and self-interested assholes that want to "piss in the well" that the 'web business' town drinks from - polluting the lifeblood of the industry.

"A large part of the criticism we got for Mahalo in the first two weeks was from SEOs, who were complaining that it was negating the work they'd done. And I'm glad. I hope they fail, because I hope they all go out of business, and have to leave their jobs, and they go and do something positive with the rest of their lives that doesn't try to piss in our well."

Mahalo aims to fix many of these problems, including the SEO issue, by being a closed system. Users can submit new links for inclusion, and can feedback and discuss results pages, but everything is filtered through the team of trusted editors and nothing gets on the official pages without their say so. Is this an admission that the wisdom of the crowds leads, more often than not, to the idiocy of the crowds, as I suggest to him? "Well, I think the wisdom of the crowds is beneficial, for sure. But I think that there is a limitation to everybody having a voice in something. If everybody has a voice, then you end up with something average. If everybody participated in the making of a movie, it wouldn't be so good. But if you give Scorcese total control, it can end up brilliant - so there's really a limit to how far you can push the wisdom of crowds."

The internet ecosystem, the pollution, the focus on dichotomous Good v Evil in the web business sphere occupies Jason's thoughts, but so many of his competitors have to operate in shades of grey. Google has to operate in China, Wikipedia has questions about governance and accountability. Is there a point at which Mahalo has to engage in something that he would consider less than ideal for the sake of the business itself? Does success require a degree of 'well leakage'? "I think that at this time, I'm blessed with a lot of runway, so I don't think that we're going to have to make too many compromises in that regard. We raised enough money to go for five years or so without revenue. When I did Netscape, I was inside AOL and there were a lot of compromises to make inside a big company. At Weblogs, there were a lot of compromises because we didn't have any money. This time, we'll add some advertisements as time goes on, but if we grow big enough with enough scale we can have less per page, and we don't have to do deceptive stuff, to do anything as bad as Ask.com. I don't see us having to be evil."

Scale and success
Of course, Mahalo can't have a result for everything, and the site refers to Google's 'long tail' results for many terms. But to help with scale, today Calacanis announces Mahalo Greenhouse, a crowdsourcing effort where part-time guides, after a substantial approval process, can write search result pages for the site within their area of expertise - and get paid for it, at around $15 per page. "What can I say, I believe in paying people for work," he mulls. "The Web 2.0 world is hypocritical - people don't like writers and editors making a living, it's seen as sell-out. So we're saying that if you want to write a search result and get paid, great. If you want to write a search result and you have something against being paid, you don't want the money, then fine, we'll donate the money to Wikipedia." This elicits a wry smile from Jason - his clashes with Wikipedia's Jimbo Wales are legendary, with Wales keen to keep commercialism out of the online encyclopedia, arguably to its detriment.

So scale - one of the key questions for the Mahalo venture - will come with the Greenhouse, as well as an upping of staff in the site's Santa Monica office to include 100 guides before the year is done. And most observers are sold on the concept - it seems obvious that humans can write things that make sense to other humans. Certainly, Calacanis is convinced that he's on to the next big thing, and believes that mixing his particular brand of eco-conservation with his not inconsiderable business brain will result in the kind of big-time success he clearly craves.

"When you use Mahalo," he muses, "You're getting the wisdom of the crowds, the reach of the machine and the curation of a human. People want information. So we just try to do that." µ