Marketing moves into the blogosphere

Jason Calacanis, who got into blogging early and big, has quit.

He co-founded a network of blogs called Weblogs in 2003, before the medium cracked the mainstream, and then sold it to AOL in 2005, working there until last year. Today he is chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine guided by editors rather than algorithms.

After five years of writing on tech-industry topics as well as personal ones and building an audience of 10,000 to 20,000 daily visitors, Calacanis said, he got tired of all the nasty commenters and opportunistic "link-baiters," people who post just to promote their own blogs.

So he signed off, leaving the blogosphere to others. One group that has been firing up its keyboards is corporate types. Of the approximately 112.5 million blogs on the Web, almost 5,000 are corporate, according to blog indexer Technorati. Calacanis blogged to start conversations and be a part of a virtual community, but corporate bloggers are in it for other reasons: talking directly to customers or giving a personal touch to a big business.