I listen to TWiT every week and Jason Calacanis is a regular guest (though rarely when Chauncey John C. Dvorak is on). The guy knows the tech industry inside out and backwards and is an astute businessman, and he's not afraid to air his opinions on anything (which is probably why he and Dvorak don't seem to get along – they both have strong "I'm right and you're an idiot" beliefs). Calacanis seems to be one of those love-him-or-hate-him kind of guys, though I keep flip-flopping. He can sometimes be an annoying blowhard while other times be one of the most insightful tech guys around. I always enjoy TWiT when he's on though since he's always entertaining; he does a spot-on Christopher Walken impression.
He even showed up on a StackOverflow podcast a little while ago and spent the entire hour begin clever and insightful, so I'm wondering if the blowhard is kind of a persona that gets people talking about him – he certainly seems to subscribe to the old mantra "I don't care what you're saying about me, as long as you're saying something".
He posted something on Twitter the other day telling people about his email list. Forget the irony of one of the pioneers of blogging using a mailing list. The really ironic thing about this is that the page to sign up for his mailing list is so 1998. No Javascript, no Flash or Silverlight, no images, doesn't even use CSS. It's just a very basic HTML 3 page with a couple of basic forms. It even uses <FONT> and other UPPERCASE TAGS just like we did back in those early days of the web. Now granted, Jason didn't create the page himself or anything, it looks like he's just using some existing mailing list site to run things for him. This guy has his finger on the pulse of the technology industry – having him use a mailing list rather than a blog is a little confusing, but him agreeing to use this terribly dated web page to do it is completely inexplicable.
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