CalacanisCast: Mahalo vs. SEOs

Jason Calacanis asked me to participate in his CalacanisCast with Andy Beard, Michael Gray and Brian Provost to discuss Mahalo. The three "SEOs" really did an excellent job of asking the right questions and getting more information about the service from Jason. The call goes for about 60 minutes and is a pretty interesting discussion overall. Thumbs-up to Jason for having some of the most critical opinions on Mahalo discuss it in an open format. It also looks like there was very little (if any) editing done to the podcast. Mahalo currently has 40 full-time employees and Jason is looking to have 100 onboard by year-end.

What I find is interesting is about the 11 minute mark, Michael notes that when you search for "DisneyWorld" you get redirected to "DisneyWorld Vacations" and Michael notes that this is a much more monetizable term. Jason did not want to answer to that and moved the call forward. And just like I wrote in the original review, Mahalo is created for two reasons: To help us get a better search experience and, more importantly, to cash in on the top keywords which pay the most.

Yesterday I replied to Jason's post about his iPhone page. Engadget is listed on that page 5! times, no other site is on there even twice. This is just one example of the bias which I stand by my belief that bias may hurt Mahalo overall. Jason also noted at 19 minute mark that he created the most popular blogger pages first. My belief is that he did this to get bigger amounts of buzz (which is actually excellent and intelligent marketing). At the 44 minute mark, Jason makes my point about bias very clearly… he notes that he will pull headlines from the same batch of sites.

Graywolf asked a good question about "domains by proxy". Jason looks at this as a big red flag as most spammers are using this. I think that's a bad decision as well, especially since his sponsor, GoDaddy, pushes those domains by proxy subscriptions like nothing else.

Anyway, you can watch the podcast below (embedded) or download the audio.