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The thing that pisses me off about Mahalo is that Calacanis goes around claiming it's some type of innovative idea/technology and that everything thing they do

by jwesley 18y ago

The thing that pisses me off about Mahalo is that Calacanis goes around claiming it's some type of innovative idea/technology and that everything thing they do is for the benefit of the users. It's a straight SEO play, along the lines of About.com. Everything they do is to increase Mahalo's search traffic! Just look at the widget mentioned in that article. Does anyone really want that set of links on their blog? Does it really help anyone? And all of Jason's friends on the blog circuit still give Mahalo good press...

jasonmcalacanis 18y ago
Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on. It's nice to get started, but you really want something like Mahalo Answers that brings back a core group of folks over and over again to do something virtuous--like helping each other. Syndicating tech headlines to a tech blog does actually help people. Also, syndicating the questions you've asked/answered with our Mahalo Answers widget also helps folks. Also, I've never claimed we are so much innovative as practical. We really just try to do the simple thing: provide folks with the content, links and Q&A they want. The big win of Mahalo will be if we save a lot of people a LOT of time and keep them safe. That being said the system is fairly advanced running on things like hadoop, nginx, memecache, etc. Also, the idea of putting a virtual currency with knowledge exchange has never been done. If it works we will have done something fairly historic: created a currency for knowledge. That really hasn't been done before. I've been around the world in the last two years looking at virtual currency and knowledge exchange in places like Korean, China and Japan and the truth is folks are using it for games 99% of the tim e (the other 1% is virtual gifts). We're the ONLY people to have ever put a currency on a knowledge exchange. That's fairly innovative from what folks have told me.... in fact some fairly intelligent folks have called it very innovative to brilliant. .... time will tell I guess. :-) all the best, Jason ps - if anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers signup and send me your account name (or post the URL here) and I'll send you M$5 to spend.
- jwesley 18y ago
  Add rel="nofollow" to the widget links and I'll believe your goal is to help people and not game the search results like everyone else. There is nothing wrong with optimizing for search traffic. Competition is all well and good. But your site is nothing more than an ad-laden Wikipedia clone with a Yahoo Answers clone tacked on. Actually, a much better business model than most startups...
- teej 18y ago
  > Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on. Are you kidding me? Tell that to Bankrate.com
- socmoth 18y ago
  didn't google answers let you put money on questions years ago. i don't know why they dropped that feature. they are the first to do it as far as i know. i don't think you can do it any longer, but there are still plenty of posts on the internet where people talk about it.

by jwesley 18y ago

jasonmcalacanis 18y ago

Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on. It's nice to get started, but you really want something like Mahalo Answers that brings back a core group of folks over and over again to do something virtuous--like helping each other. Syndicating tech headlines to a tech blog does actually help people. Also, syndicating the questions you've asked/answered with our Mahalo Answers widget also helps folks. Also, I've never claimed we are so much innovative as practical. We really just try to do the simple thing: provide folks with the content, links and Q&A they want. The big win of Mahalo will be if we save a lot of people a LOT of time and keep them safe. That being said the system is fairly advanced running on things like hadoop, nginx, memecache, etc. Also, the idea of putting a virtual currency with knowledge exchange has never been done. If it works we will have done something fairly historic: created a currency for knowledge. That really hasn't been done before. I've been around the world in the last two years looking at virtual currency and knowledge exchange in places like Korean, China and Japan and the truth is folks are using it for games 99% of the tim e (the other 1% is virtual gifts). We're the ONLY people to have ever put a currency on a knowledge exchange. That's fairly innovative from what folks have told me.... in fact some fairly intelligent folks have called it very innovative to brilliant. .... time will tell I guess. :-) all the best, Jason ps - if anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers signup and send me your account name (or post the URL here) and I'll send you M$5 to spend.

jwesley 18y ago
Add rel="nofollow" to the widget links and I'll believe your goal is to help people and not game the search results like everyone else. There is nothing wrong with optimizing for search traffic. Competition is all well and good. But your site is nothing more than an ad-laden Wikipedia clone with a Yahoo Answers clone tacked on. Actually, a much better business model than most startups...
teej 18y ago
> Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on. Are you kidding me? Tell that to Bankrate.com
socmoth 18y ago
didn't google answers let you put money on questions years ago. i don't know why they dropped that feature. they are the first to do it as far as i know. i don't think you can do it any longer, but there are still plenty of posts on the internet where people talk about it.