He was an early Web 1.0 entrepreneur who founded Silicon Alley Reporter (which failed) and Weblogs, Inc (which got bought out by AOL). He's sort of a "startup celebrity" in the sense that he's (a) opinionated and (b) good at getting those opinions into people's faces. He's involved in a wide range of stuff in the startup-support ecosystem, and he's also the founder of Mahalo. He describes Mahalo as "people-powered search", as in you search for something on Mahalo and you get a professionally written page, but detractors think he's about one step removed from a content farm.
Not sure where you get the "one step removed" bit. It is a content farm, at least in the places where it isn't simply copies of Wikipedia or autogenerated text.
