Love him or hate him Jason Calcanis was one of the first people to get the power of blogging. Actually as Jason tells it his employees were some of the first to get it including Rafiq Ali of paidContent.org.

Jason just said something that struck me. After another one of his employees started to write for Boing Boing he asked he started to wonder if he was holding his people back. That as an editor he had been sifling fantastic writers.

I will have more later but the story of Weblogs Inc. is compelling and I don’t want to miss any of it.

I have heard a lot of keynotes and a lot of lame seminars in my life time. This one was great. Calcanis was funny, and very forthright, and as he so often is controversial.

His talk was full of anecdotes about how he created his Weblogs inc. empire including how he convinced a good friend to come to work for him instead of MySpace while they were at Burning Man.  oops.

He also had a hillarious imitation of his long time (in web 2.0 years) competitor/rival and now friend Nick Denton of Gawker Media.

Most of his points were hard to argue with and very quotable:

“Bloggers are a bunch of misfits who couldn’t make it anywhere else and if you try to control them you will ruin it.”

“Some people are great bloggers and some people suck at it.”

“If you want to post twice a month and have nothing to say then you are a loser.”

“Blogging is not broken, the blogosphere is not broken. Blogging is the best form of meritocracy in history. If you hustle you will be rewarded.”

“If you want to do a better job at blogging then blog more, blog better. Link to more people.”

“Covert marketing is also known as lying.”

“This podcasting thing is gonna be big.”

Calcanis also announced he will begin podcasting at PodTech, and that Go Daddy will be sponsorsing his podcast. Go Daddy and PodTech are jointly donating 100,000 to create a scholarship fund allowing two disadvantaged students to attend Bay Ridge Prep. school.

Others blogging: tucows 

The YouTube moment of the day … Calacanis doing Nick Denton.  God I hope it makes it up.

Lots of people will be talking about this today.