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Mar 27
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I got home today and started my usual half-hour’s surfing, checking email, forums, etc. and saw that Jason Calacanis had posted on Twitter to say he was streaming live video on Ustream and I thought I’d check it out. Jason is the CEO of Mahalo, a start-up search engine with a difference – instead of crawling the web and picking up every site out there (including the SEO’d link spam) Mahalo is a “human powered search” where the results are crafted by hand. You might think this is a little odd but Mahalo aims more at handling the most common searches very well and eschews the more detailed and technical searches like specific error messages or code fragments. Mahalo also has a hint Wikipedia to it in that users can create pages, edit text and recommend links to go with certain search terms.
On the Ustream page Jason decided that as a collective (the room had around 150 members) we should start building some Mahalo pages and he kind-of walked us through the process, I myself signed up whilst on the call. Now I was cooking dinner during this period but I still managed to participate in the pages for “Home Theatre PC“, “Home Theater” and “Eye TV“, submitting a handful of links I thought might be useful.
The whole experience was great fun and really demonstrated the point of Mahalo but the amazing part was just the buzz and excitement of over a hundred people collabarating live, being orchestrated by Jason who was intermittently addressing the room and hollering at Mahalo staff in the background, some of whom he also put on air. All in all this was definitely one of those “wow” moments I still get on the Internet from time to time, proof that amazing things are possible if people work together and whilst I’m not ready to give up Google I will lean a lot more towards Mahalo if I just want an overview of a particular topic.