Congratulations! You've hit upon the tragic core of this industry: Namely, that it's full of semimature people who are only well-known because they're well-known. This is such a new field of study that even the biggest figures are usually only halfgood at what they do.<p>That's cruel. Let me rephrase: This isn't a new field. It's a <i>series</i> of new fields, all developing in tandem. Web design, web coding, web marketing, are all necessarily only a couple of decades old. The tools we're using are younger than that. Two years ago we were still debating how to align a webpage vertically. We've only begun to have real web typography in the same period of time. And programming is similarly new, and we still don't have good web marketing. But those of us who're invested in the web don't like to think about that, so we convince ourselves that we're as advanced and sophisticated as anything else. To do that, we lower the bar.<p>Celebrities in any field tend to balance skill and marketability. Rarely is somebody both ultrafamous and cutting-edge. So in a world where nobody is really that famous and nobody is really that talented, our famous icons are doubly pathetic. Even our best icons, like Zeldman and Fried, are bright but not really operating on a new plane. (I think there are some exceptions, like Dean Allen, but Dean isn't the size of Calcanis.)<p>That's why the brightest talents in our sphere come from other mediums. I think the best designers I know are all twee and twenty and annoying as fuck. For all their immaturity, that's the first generation that could grow up immersed in all the aspects of the business. But admitting their superiority is admitting just how fucking clueless we all are, and that wouldn't be as fun for the communty.<p>Calcanis is a particular jerk, though. I never got why we like him here. Mahalo's been a joke from launch day.<p>(Sorry if there were spelling errors. I wrote this on an iPod.)