I feel for Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis this past week. He finishes his Launch conference (my recap), heads to the afterparty and probably gets 10,000 text messages because that was just about the time that Google announced their algorithm change. Assuming Jason wasn’t briefed by Google about the change, that really is pretty horrible timing and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, even a guy from the B-line (I am D-line).

This afternoon Jason and Mahalo president Jason Rapp sent out a mass email noting that, based on the Google changes, they will be reducing Mahalo staff headcount immediately by 10%. Here are a few key points directly from Jason and Jason:

• (re: the google change) Despite those efforts, unfortunately, the Google changes have led to a
  significant dip in our traffic and revenue. It’s hard not to be disappointed since we’ve been spending millions of
  dollars on producing highly professional content.
• Today we have eliminated a handful of positions in the company (about 10%), and we’ve cut a number of non-essential services we provide internally. In addition, we are re-evaluating our freelance content
  production, pausing it in the near term and determining how to best produce the high-quality educational material we aspire to in the long run. We are not, however, diminishing our video production efforts.
• Interestingly, while the search side of Google has impacted us negatively, Google’s video unit (YouTube) continues to be our strong partner, encouraging us to ramp up our video production and publish even more of our expert video lessons with them.

What’s really interesting to me is that I remember when Mahalo first launched, Jason told me numerous times he didn’t care about Google because he was going to build loyal users who would just come directly to Mahalo (e.g. similar to how we just go to TripAdvisor to look up a hotel).

Two other emails from Mahalo team leaders note that the “Guides” program will be placed on hold as Jason notes above. But they made it clear that Guides will be paid for work to-date.

Jason also notes, “The web is moving from the home of journalism and writers to the domain of experts. Web 3.0 is the era of experts–not writers.” They close by noting that they have strong board support for their move into how-to videos and have plenty of cash for a long runway.

Will Jason’s move to video make the 4th version of Mahalo successful? The only thing I am curious about is if he is paying his expert talent that appear in his how-to videos. His video interview in Germany seemed to indicate many of the experts are working for free to gain some rep points and badges.

If you are interested in learning more about the changes Google made last week, you can read excellent recaps by Danny Sullivan and Aaron Wall.

Update: In another case of really bad timing, Derek Springer noticed the lead story Mahalo is pushing today is “How to dress for a job interview”. See screenshot below…

Find more stories about: Calacanis, Google, Mahalo, SEO

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis announced earlier this week that they are now renting space at their HQ in Santa Monica, California. Apparently the Mahalo office is about 10,000 square feet and they are renting out at least 4,000 square feet. Makes sense with all of the staff they have let go over the past months. Pricing was not disclosed. Check out the photos – pretty nice looking space.

From the announcement, “All with morning oatmeal, desks, Aeron chairs, Polycom SoundPoint IP 550 VOIP phones, printers, facsimile, redundant internet, WiFi, coffee, tea, cleaning, all utilities, shared kitchen, conference, green screen/podcasting facilities, in 10,000 ft space.”

It looks like Causecast is also sharing the space – they were a Techcrunch50 finalist – just saying.  (Update: Jason says CauseCast has moved out and that’s some of the open space) From what we understand they have changed their hiring policies so no more worries about putting your startup next to criminals. Annual renewals will receive one ride in the Tesla.  The very fancy coffee and tea pot is available for $2.50 a cup – Google AdSense ain’t paying what it used to yo.

All jokes aside, this concept of renting out space seems to be pretty popular these days as startups shrink their size. I know many companies doing it here in NYC as well.

Find more stories about: Mahalo

There’s been a lot of talk the past couple of weeks about URL shorteners and the new DiggBar. Even Leah Culver, former partner to Kevin Rose on Pownce, has come out against the methods of the DiggBar. One of the issues with the DiggBar is that it "frames" the content of the site which can lead to a variety of issues. Daring Fireball has laid out his concerns with the DiggBar yesterday.

So what does Jason Calacanis, founder of Q&A service Mahalo, think about the concept of framing? Appears he hates it when Facebook does it but loves it when Digg does it.

Facebook:

Digg:

Find more stories about: Calacanis, clean url, Mahalo, Quick News

In case you are seeking employment in the product management field, q&a service Mahalo is hiring. Check out the full job description on Craigslist. It’s important to know that you must be "THE BEST" to apply for this position. Some other important notes from the posting:

• you will work hard
• it’s "life-changing"
• it’s an "incredible" opportunity
• you must be ready everyday to "kill it" – yes, based on twitter messages, it does mean everyday
• you will work hard

It’s got to be tough around Mahalo these days… what’s happened lately you ask?

• they shut down their greenhouse
• in the new upcoming greenhouse, many of the tasks will be moved to Manila  or to the buck-a-post answers system
• Andy Beal claimed that Mahalo is involved in a "pagerank funneling link scheme"
• Leah D’Emilio – host of the very popular Mahalo Daily video show quit this week – the show will move to a weekly format to become profitable
• Apparently while they only want "the best" – they did hire a felon. Apparently Jason’s HR department forgot to do a quick Google check on their employee.

My questions about the felonious hire are…

• Once the Mahalo executives found out about this situation, did they share the news with the rest of the employees?
• What about the Mahalo team in Manila – have they been checked?
• I think there’s a difference between giving a person a second chance after they have served their time and keeping a person who has yet to be sentenced on the payroll
• While Jason plays down the security fears some of Mahalo’s users might have, they are now accepting money from users on Answers. While I am guessing the number of people who have deposited their own money is less than 10, I think those people are due some answers.
• Rafe at CNET asks similar questions about trust with regards to Mahalo going forward and Rafe also wonders if we should trust any Web service that has a convicted hacker on the payroll

Let’s hope next week is a better one for Mahalo!

Find more stories about: jobs, Mahalo, Quick News, search

Last night, Sara from q&a site Mahalo sent out the following email to all Greenhouse workers letting them know their services won’t be needed for the next 60 days. In case you aren’t familiar with Greenhouse, it was setup about a year ago to be the main place for Mahalo’s temporary workers to "pick up" pages that Mahalo wanted created.

For example, they might have pages listed for "How to get a good credit score" or "How to learn French". Typically the pages paid about $10, some of the pages that would take potentially days to write (e.g. a game walkthrough) could go up to $150.

We are going to pause Greenhouse SeRP submissions for the next 60 days. If you have an in-progress page, please submit it as soon as possible, no later than the end of day, Monday, March 2, 2009. Please do not claim any new terms–pages claimed today or later will not be reviewed.

We are revamping the system and will have a new opportunity for contributors in April 2009–please stay tuned for more details!

It looks like the game walkthroughs will continue - my guess is that these pages drive more revenue and make sense to consider.

Are they planning to shift the workers from $10/page on Greenhouse to ~$1/page on their Answers product? Might make sense considering their SEO and crowdsourced-content strategies.

I guess we will need to wait until April!

Find more stories about: Mahalo, Quick News, wiki

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacnis has posted an in-depth email to his huge private mailing list this evening to provide more details about the firings and changes at Mahalo today. While I can’t republish the email, I thought I would provide my honest thoughts on his comments.

Jason begins with today’s post from his blog. I’d have thought the post would have been better placed on the Mahalo blog. It’s important to speak to your customers more than anything.

He then explains that he still has 30 FT staff across 6 offices in California and more than 50 freelancers. In his interview last week in London with Intruders Jason stated that they have 100 FT plus 200-300 freelancers. Not sure which number is accurate.

I will agree with Jason that there’s nothing worse than having to look an employee in the face and telling them that they are no longer employed with x firm. It’s not something any manager ever wants to have to do. This part of his email is well worth reading.

Jason notes that most of the Mahalo reorg was handled while he was out traveling the world. He explains that he pushed his executives to come up with a cost-savings plan within two weeks which included five days to analyze and execute the plan. With 4 years of money "even if we never generate a penny" why was there a need to rush to a decision? Why not take the time to accurately look at the situation? I am still confused at how the economy is playing a role in today’s decision. From my perspective and to be completely honest, after reading his email, his blog post and the other reviews today, I get the sense that today’s announcement is a traditional business restructuring rather than directly due to the current economy.

Jason compares firing staff members with a sports team coach letting players go at training camp. This is really an unfair comparison. The people that Jason has fired/restructured are the people who built Mahalo and apparently put in their blood, sweat and tears. A fairer (but not accurate either) comparison would be a coach firing his/her offensive line the day before the superbowl.

He wants the company to have four years of runway with no income coming in — this was his goal with today’s restructuring. He was spending two editorial dollars for every technology dollar — this makes sense considering his vision is for a human network, not a computer network.

He goes on to explain that the people who work at home are significantly cheaper than full-time employees. Isn’t that usually how it works? So what cuts were there?

• Mahalo daily video editors are now contract employees – Jason doesn’t specify if these employees get any benefits at all
• They swapped their phone lines to save $1.5/month – although I thought this was done earlier this year?
• They rent out office space to other companies
• He won’t be traveling the world anymore – even though last week in Asia he said that Americans should travel outside the U.S. – 10-12x a year to be successful
• They have moved "aggressively" to a freelance workforce – this means no benefits, no stock. This is so different than everything I’ve heard from Jason to-date.
• We also learned that Jason likes to blog from his garden near his pool

Jason then shifts to revenues where he explains that they have "aggresively" started running Google AdSense. This is clearly noticeable as the ads mirror the content exactly. My gramma would never be able to tell the difference. Good to see Jason be upfront about the change here. He’s also working on partnership deals around content – if he can close 20% of them, it will help cut their spending by 10%. He ends by explaining that they are focusing on building revenue now – and I completely agree with this.

Jason doesn’t believe an end to the current financial situation is in sight.

He shares some points around executing the workforce reductions:

• do it all at once – I agree, pull the bandaid off at once versus slowly don’t sugarcoat it
• cutting salaries is typically worse than cutting headcount – I generally agree, large companies do this pretty often – fire the expensive workers and replace them with cheaper less experienced talent. Of course in today’s market
• you can grab top quality talent for a much cheaper price.
• give severance – i’d like to see him share what he did for his employees today. when they moved to freelancer status, did he pay out their stock options? this is where i’d like some answers.
• get everyone focused again – frankly my suggestion is to close the office for a day – let people clear the air – especially with today’s internet – all of his staff will be reading posts like crazy – let them clear their heads and take a deep breath.

I leave you with this… I’ve said since day 1 that for Mahalo to survive they have to move away from humans and more to technology. I continue this belief with today’s announcement. And just like I said in my previous post, if there’s anyone affected today by the job cuts at Mahalo (or anywhere else), drop me a line if there’s something I can help with. (don’t ask for money though, I have none to give)

Find more stories about: Bloggers, Blogging, blogs, Calacanis, Mahalo, Quick News

Just back from a business trip to Europe and Asia, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has decided to make some cuts, firing nearly 10% of the staff and has started to rent out space to other startups. From what we understand, the rentals started earlier as Techcrunch50 finalist CauseCast has been renting space for a while. It’s good to see Jason took my advice from last week.

The staffers who were fired today are absolutely the best of the best. In London at FOWA, Calacanis explained that he only hires the top, best possible talent. This should probably help the fired staffers with future job inquiries. Good luck to all of those who lost their jobs at Mahalo today and if I can be of any help, send me an email.

One of the questions I’ve wondered about and have been asked for my opinion a number of times over the past month is whether the startups that are firing staff are doing it because of the economy or because their business model concepts or actual ideas are the real issue. It’s a very difficult question to answer without getting a look at the information from the inside. I posed the question on Twitter and was pointed to Jonathan Gheller who recently closed his startup Fashmatch. He notes that it wasn’t the economy that pushed them to close.

I certainly can’t say which reason is at fault for Jason’s decision to fire staff today. I can only assume it’s economy related based on the fact that his entire team are the highest delivering employees possible. 

My view on Mahalo is the same as it was day 1; to be successful they will need certain pages to drive the large share of revenue. While ads on the site now mirror exactly the other links on the page (this may actually confuse visitors), will that be enough to drive users to click on the ads? And how much does a page require to break-even? I’ve also started to see an overall drop in Mahalo’s standings in Google. What used to be instant page 1 status now has been pushed further back. Mahalo has $20 million in funding so they have some runway to continue to refine their business model as they continue to grow.

Mahalo Daily, the video show, also appears to be declining in viewership even with their SEO titles and excellent thumbnail work.

Ashkan summarizes the Mahalo business model:

Mahalo’s traffic strategy right now is simply to jump on the latest, breaking news, publish a page on it, and hope that Google’s super quick spiders index their page… It’s a gimmick, not a worthless one, but not exactly priceless either.

There’s been chatter about more Mahalo positions moving overseas. Our sources tell us that Jason has opened an office in Manilla. I don’t want to speculate on what positions are located there yet – we are still waiting for some final confirmation. We were provided this photo which was shot by a Mahalo staffer of what appears to be (unconfirmed) the Mahalo team in Manilla. I count 25 people in the photo.

Find more stories about: business, Mahalo, Quick News, wiki

Last weekend Mike Arrington wrote that people who blog are basically automatically associated with the companies they work for even if it the content is on their own personal blog. While I disagree overall with his view, I do believe there is one group of people to whom the association does apply. That group are CEOs, more specifically startup CEOs. I’ve written and spoken for a long time about how tools like blogs and now Twitter will ruin careers because they make it so easy to say something you regret a moment later. With today’s Internet services, a moment is all that’s needed to wish you could DVR back and change what was said.

I’ve noticed a number of startup CEOs making comments that are just out of line either about a person, a group of people, a subject, etc. I’d like to share two of the most recent comments that have been pointed towards me in the hopes that if you are a startup CEO, you will pick up some tips on things not to do. Remember, whatever you say today, will follow you forever. Think before you hit the update button.

Last week I posted a column looking at the NY Tech Meetup and what it takes to present. I used iminlikewithyou CEO Charles Forman as my example because he was one of the evening’s presenters who was able to present multiple times and was able to use slides when that’s not allowed for others. I don’t know Charles, the only interaction we’ve had was saying hello at the meetup. Charles sent me an email after my post requesting that I post his video because he wanted to see it. I obliged and posted the video for him to use an hour later.

Charles Forman, the CEO of iminlikewithyou, decided to post a comment which was picked up on Valleywag. You can read the entire comment on VW but nearly moments after his comment I began to receive emails (including from his friends) noting how horrible it was for him to use personal attacks when they weren’t warranted. Here are a couple of the things he said: — This service is now known as OMGPOP –

• If you have a problem with fairness, why aren’t you paying $20? You very realistically take up 2 seats.
• I think the real problem is that you are jealous of my ability to run a mile in under 3 days. Maybe its that I date hot girls?
• You are a sad, lonely, disgusting man. I hope you don’t die of a coronary before we have a chance to patch things up.

If I was an investor in his company, I’d be seriously concerned that this type of person is running a company with our money. Most experts note that when this type of behavior goes on outside of the company, it typically goes on inside as well. I can only imagine that if he made these types of comments to an employee, a suit could easily be filed.

Perhaps Charles should focus more on his business as from the charts below, it looks like even with all of his self-promotion, it’s gone nowhere.

Shortly after Charles posted his comment, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis responded with with the following message, “mega-troll Allen Stern crushed by Charles Forman over a “meetup” – wow”. What that says to me is that Jason encourages this type of behavior. We’ve seen these type of attacks many times before with Jason. If you don’t write fluff posts about Mahalo, you are instantly a “hater”. Jason has said things including that the entire SEO industry is a bunch of haters, 37Signals apparently are haters and when Andrew Baron noted that Mahalo traffic was flat, he too became a hater. What does it say to the Mahalo employees, both in the U.S. and in other countries, that their leader encourages unwarranted personal attacks? With the rate of departures from Mahalo over the past few months, could it be that this behavior goes on inside the office as well?

Based on the chart below from comScore and most of the online analytics services, perhaps Jason should too focus more of his energy on Mahalo rather than encouraging this type of behavior. comScore reports Mahalo’s August U.S. visitors at 1.688 million and a decline for September to 1.383 million, about a 20% drop. Other services, Quantcast and Compete show a similar drop.

Again, my hope with this post is to get you to think about the things you say and how you act in public. Don’t say or do something that will not only hurt you today, but more importantly in the future.

Find more stories about: iminlikewithyou, Mahalo, NYC, OMGPOP, Quick News, startups

Reports have been arriving in my inbox and on Twitter that Mahalo has been up and down the past couple of days. In my testing today, I get error messages on about 65% of page loads. So far no official word from Mahalo except postings that they are doing a movie screening tonight

We are also hearing that Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is planning to reveal the new Mahalo 2.0 later this week at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. On a recent podcast, Calacanis noted that the site had 4.6 million unique visitors in August. Calacanis points to Quantcast as his favorite metric service as it shows a nice upward traffic trend for Mahalo (it’s unverified traffic). Andrew Baron from Rocketboom pointed to Google Trends to show the complete opposite, a slow trending down in traffic. Perhaps all of their pages on the election are getting hit hard and that’s causing the outages.

If you use Mahalo and are experiencing any errors please leave them in the comments. Here’s what the page looks like when you receive the error message:

Find more stories about: human search, Mahalo, Quick News, search

Earlier today Google announced that Google Knol is now open to the public. Danny Sullivan has an awesome overview of how Google Knol works.

I thought this would be a good time to compare three crowdsourced encyclopedias: Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia. Each one takes a different angle on why you should contribute.

Do you participate in any of these crowdsourced encyclopedias? If so, what factors helped make your decision? Was it to help the "greater good" or was it a financial decision?

Here are some thoughts on each encyclopedia and why people contribute to each:

Find more stories about: Crowdsourced, Google Knol, Insights, Mahalo, wiki, Wikipedia

Last week marked the apparent end of one man’s blogging career. Most believe that it is a hoax but I know that this individual would never use trickery or magic potions to get more traffic to his startup. This person has created a mailing list to more effectively communicate with his network. I can’t link to the mailing list because it was capped at 500 1,000 1,100. Steven Hodson has deciphered the email for the rest of us.

I wasn’t planning on posting about this topic but I just received a video from the "blogger king" at the "blogger information network" - apparently there is a program to actually effectively quit blogging. Anyway have a look below and you decide for yourself. The full email blast is located here.

Find more stories about: Calacanis, Mahalo, Quick News, SEO, Video

We initially reviewed blog directory Blogged earlier this year. It’s a human curated blog directory that provides a (somewhat bogus) score for each blog. Today Blogged is back with their launch of a news portal site. Blogged editors will pull breaking news and the most compelling stories from their content categories (technology, entertainment, sports, etc.) and then displays the stories on the frontpage.

Here is how Blogged compares itself to the other news sites like Google News and Yahoo News along with the “meme trackers” like TechMeme:

Google News and Yahoo News feature top stories from traditional news sources using a combination of technology and human editors. Memetrackers such as Techmeme and Blogrunner use algorithms to identify and present related stories as told by cliques of bloggers related to a particular industry. User-generated news communities such as Mixx, Digg, and Reddit showcase popular stories daily from across the Web as saved and voted on by individuals. Blogged.com is the only community that features the top qualified stories, representing all popular topics, organized by categories from around the blogosphere, combined with a full informational directory that includes rankings, reviews and recommended reading for each blog.

Today’s launch by Blogged seems very similar to what Blogrunner offers except that it’s human curated versus machine-driven. From a gathering the news standpoint, it’s basically like Mahalo. Both Mahalo and Blogrunner create tag pages, Mahalo uses their staff and volunteers to find links, Blogrunner uses computers to find the links. Blogged seems to be more in the Mahalo style but without the tag pages.

I don’t know how large the Blogged team is, but my only question is whether they be able to stay on top of all of the breaking news across so many categories and be able to bubble up the news in (near) real-time? If so, awesome. Also, I hope they will provide diversity in the blogs that they pimp.

They should add a social layer on top of the news – since they know a lot about each blog, there’s a wealth of information they could layer on top of the news and create a community effect on top of the news.

Everyone consumes news in different ways and the one-page category portal-style overveiew should work well for a mainstream audience.

Find more stories about: Blogged, Blogrunner, Mahalo, Quick News, Social News, TechMeme

With Yahoo signing away their advertising business today to Google, I thought it would be interesting to look at the major search engines and see who handles their advertising. Have a look at the list below and check out just how dominant Google is. You wonder why no one is using the other search engines — it’s easy, if the search engine can’t sell ads, perhaps their technology isn’t as good either, right? Please add other engines in the comments and I will add them to the list.

	Company	Advertising Partner	Notes
	Google	Google
	Yahoo	Yahoo/Google	Google ads to begin in three months.
	Ask	Google
	Microsoft	Microsoft
	YouTube	Google
	AOL	Google
	Facebook	n/a	Facebook runs their “social ads”.
	hakia	Yahoo	Per the conference call today, hakia will now be able to run Google ads as well
	Mahalo	Google	Mahalo no longer claims to be a search engine
	Wikia	Google (see note)	No ads are displayed currently — Update: June 13 – Wikia is now displaying Google advertising
	Twerq	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	MySpace	Google
	a9	Amazon	Ads are related items from Amazon.com

Find more stories about: Amazon, Google, Hakia, Insights, Mahalo, Microsoft, MySpace, search, yahoo, YouTube

Yesterday we learned that Brijit has closed its doors (at least temporarily). When I interviewed Founder & CEO Jeremy Brosowsky back in December, one of the topics we discussed was my concern about their business model. Trying to pay a staff (in this case writers) with CPC advertising is very difficult. I’d like to note that my conversation with Jeremy was one of my favorites to-date; Jeremy is a very bright guy.

As I thought about Brijit some more last night, Mahalo came to mind. Mahalo utilizes a similar structure to Brijit in that they have a team of writers and link scrapers who scour the Internet for the latest hot topic to create Mahalo pages for. Brijit created article abstracts which is similar to the content Mahalo creates around a topic. Mahalo adds a variety of links on the topic while Brijit only linked to the original source article. Mahalo has also created many "how-to" articles which are much more in-depth and pay more (some are up to $150 per how-to).

One of the differences between Brijit and Mahalo is that Mahalo has very strong search engine rankings. CEO Jason Calacanis has become a master SEO and this will help Mahalo over the long-term. Brijit didn’t have good search engine rankings and I think this was a major factor in their lack of ability to generate revenue. Calacanis does an excellent job in "sending" pagerank to Mahalo through his very authoritative calacanis.com blog. Calacanis also has 20,000+ Twitter followers and each time he posts a link to Mahalo, some percentage (my guess is 2-4%) will click through. Both of these traffic drivers require no marketing expenditure which can help to drive the ROI up. Mahalo relies on two types of traffic: search engines and Calacanis’ shills – both on his blog and on Twitter.

Brijit paid a flat rate $5/abstract while Mahalo pays both full-time salaries to its in-house employees and a sliding scale to it’s freelancers. While most of the pages on Mahalo will take years to return the money invested to create the pages, a few gems should be able to take care of the load. My guess is that their 100+ Grand Theft Auto 4 walkthrough pages will be some of those gems. Mahalo is banking on the gems.

Last month we learned that Mahalo workers need to write more words to capture more search engine rankings and we also learned that Mahalo is testing affiliate relationships as a way to increase revenue.

Mahalo has already started to push link research to the "free" community. I imagine we will see more pushed to the free side to maximize the ROI over time.

If Mahalo staffers aren’t looking at why Brijit didn’t work, they should. It could provide some valuable insight in how to avoid similar issues from affecting Mahalo.

Find more stories about: Brijit, Insights, Mahalo, search

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis had a busy week last week. We learned of three major Mahalo updates: they are now a research engine, if you want to get paid you must write more and link less, SEO is critical for the success of the research engine.

Mahalo is no longer a search engine as it was classified upon the initial launch nearly a year ago. Calacanis is now calling his company a "research engine". While I don’t think it’s a search engine, it’s not a research engine either. The closest thing I could compare it to is a combo of delicious plus a couple paragraphs of juicy content.

When Mahalo launched, I asked Calacanis whether the site was created for the purpose of driving traffic through search engines. He noted, "Are we an SEO master? If Google wants to index us well that’s fine with us, but our model is not based on being well indexed in Google or Yahoo. Our model is in creating human curated search results that are very helpful to users."

In an email to his greenhouse workers last week, he changed his tune. "No guide notes, no google/yahoo rankings, and no traffic. No traffic, no money. No money, we all go home." With nearly 75% of Mahalo traffic coming from Google, this guide note change is important. It would be interesting to learn what percentage of traffic must leave via advert or affiliate link for Mahalo to be profitable.

Last week, Calacanis changed the policy for his large workforce by mandating a minimum of 300-400 word guide notes. These are typically the only content on a (non how-to) page. My guess is that this lengthening of the guide notes is a direct response to Aaron Wall’s post that Mahalo is Spam.

In case you are interested in where the search engine traffic is coming from, I ran a paid report on Compete for the 50 most popular terms sending traffic from Google to Mahalo:

mahalo, how to play guitar, big brother 9 spoilers, halo 3 skulls, 2 girls 1 cup, best computer speakers, halo 3 armor, ashley dupree, gene simmons sex tape, bridget mccain, how to write a resume, guitar hero 3 cream, christopher allport, how to make mash potatoes, abby, mcgrew, tax rebate 2008, how to make sushi, vicki iseman, guitar hero cheats, lindsay lohan new york magazine, guitar hero 3 cheats, guitar hero 3 song list, super smash bros brawl secret characters, brawl secret stages, guitar hero iii cheats, pokemon crater, amy fisher video, sarah larson, big brother 9 spoiler, is new york pregnant, cloverfield monster pictures, how to speak french, flat belly diet, wikipedia ashlee simpson, guitar hero 3 wii cheats, parkville maryland bethany, bush tax rebate, wwe smackdown v.s. raw 2008 online guide, lil romeo 50 million, daisy de la hoya, flavorofloveworld, youtube heavy metal don felder, dorothy hamill skating timeline, net gun, dmc4 secret achievements, lost odyssey game guide, nfl tour review, blazing angels 2 cheats, silver skulls in halo 3, halo 3 armor unlock

I believe we will continue to see a shift with Mahalo which will push unpaid people to create, edit and maintain the content on Mahalo. Guide notes have already been opened for editing if you have more than one published item and links are already provided by the community. Though as Dunan Riley noted yesterday about another site similar to Mahalo which also works perfectly here, "With no revenue sharing model there’s no obvious reason why someone would contribute to the Wiki (after all there’s no for the good of humanity angle like Wikipedia)".

Later this week we will look at why Calacanis is pretty smart.

Find more stories about: human search, Insights, Mahalo, search, social search