via youtube.com
Hearty congrats to Cenk
While community managing (moderating) over at Mahalo Answers I spend a lot of great time reading peoples initial thoughts upon becoming new Mahalo users.
This is quite a unique perspective, not surprisingly we are getting a lot of users telling me they come from Yahoo Answers and look at Mahalo as a safe haven away from all the tom-foolery that happens over at Yahoo, new users appear to like the long professional responses and genuine help they are getting from the Mahalo community.
I think soon I'll be reading similar comments that people are coming from Wikipedia.
A good percentage of Wikipedians are nothing but uber-fans who have dedicated a lot of time into curating their page, because they know on Wikipedia, your page is the reference for the entire Internet. Mahalo wants uber-fans claiming Topic pages, all you have to do is be passionate about a topic and Mahalo gives you the resources to build the next Wikipedia style-reference pages for the internet.
Mahalo right now currently gets a majority of the traffic comes for "How To" pages, probably because Mahalo has a large Q&A orientated community. In the future I can see the Topic pages taking off. This Michael Jackson page for example is not only a great search result by giving the top results for links/news/images/videos/tweets and FAQs, this page has the potential of becoming a community hub on the topic and a future starting point for all Internet Michael Jackson needs.
Michael Jackson
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That's just Michael Jackson, every topic ever searched could have a results like this within Mahalo search. Mahalo Topic Archives can be built for rarely changing topics like World War II, this page can only be improved upon and as the years go I can only imagine how well this page will evolve into a timeless archive like the current Wikipedia page on the topic.
World War II
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On the flip side a page can be build for a Buzzy topic, this page might be popular and huge for 10 minutes, but during those 10 minutes the Mahalo pages gets all the net traffic and owner pockets a few bucks. Oh.. Did I mention Mahalo Pages could be the next blogging job too...geez, thats for another day.
Sarah Palin Resigns
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The new Mahalo is the greatest archiving tool, I have just started to get my feed wet. Ever since I started working on the Mahalo Archive I played with documentary presentation. On the old Mahalo it looked good, so good James Burke personally emailed me to tell me how "Masterly" his documentary series "The Day the Universe Changed" looked. Well, Mahalo 2.0 recently launched and I finally had a chance to update the documentary, and I must say it looks great. I hope more chopped up documentaries pop up on Mahalo some day.
Mahalo has recently done some updates, they left the wiki-code world and launched Mahalo 2.0. In doing so they have opened up their vast website of Serps (search result pages) and have allowed users to claim pages. This has big money potential for any willing contributor. CNET wrote a great article about it here.
In a nutshell, users can search for any term, for example "David Attenborough" they can then "claim" the page and become the "David Attenborough" archive curator. What this means is they must update the page regularly (at least once every 15 days) to keep it fresh for the visitors. In return users a rewarded with a cut of the advertising revenue. During the first few days it's been hard to tell how much money people will earn, but were hoping traffic will grow and users can earn a couple thousands extra bucks a year.
Naturally, money is not the sole motivator for most internet users. Curating an online archive of your favourite subject could be seen as a hobby for some, all those Wikipedians are hobbyists, we hope to catch the same type of user, people passionate about sharing information their favourite topic.
What I really like about Mahalo 2.o is the technology behind it, you don't need to know any code, all the pages are click and draggable meaning you can sort the content how you like. When you start a new page Mahalo will automatically fill it up with suggested links, videos, images, mechandise and more, it's quite a powerful product.
One great example of how you can play with the pages is from my old "The Day The Universe Changed" page, this is an old documentary series that is clipped up on youTube. I took each 10 minute segment added a point by point summery. It looked good on the old Mahalo (so good James Burke himself complimented it) with the new Mahalo the pages look absolutely brilliant!
Anyway, we hope to attract lots of new users and lots of archivers and curators to help make Mahalo pages the best pages on the Internet.
and look each page has a widget, so you can market them nicely.
David Attenborough
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September 2005: ThrowawayyourTV.com Domain Purchased
October 2005: ThrowawayyourTV - 1st Attempt as a link Archive
Nov 2005: First Del.icio.us Tag Archive created.
Jan 2006: TayTV Media Blog created
March 2006: 1st Time on the Front Page of Digg
April 2006: TayTV account banned from YouTube for uploading the Stephen Colbert CSPAN WHC Dinner Clip
July 2006: 1 Millionth Visitor
July 2006: (My 25th Birthday)
August 2006: Reached Reddit Top Ten
August 2006: (I moved from Ontario to BC)
Sept 2006: TayTV Forum Created.
October 2006: First paying advertisement on TayTV
November 2006: Signed contract with Netscape.
Jan 2007: ThrowawayyourTV.com becomes a Charity Blog
Feb 2007: New Tag Archive has 300 Del.icio.us fans
Feb 2007: Picture in the Wall Street Journal
Feb 2007: Article in the Globe and Mail
Feb 2007: ThrowawayyourTV.com Crashes. Have to restart
Feb 2007: Blog.throwawayyourtv.com Created
March 2007: Tag Series Begins
March 2007: 2nd Del.Icio.Us Tag Archive Retired
March 2007: TayTV Builds Videosift Collective
May 2007: Socially Given Charity crumbles under the weight of success.
May 2007: Contract with AOL Newsbloggers
May 2007: TayTV Collective put on Hiatus and Closed
May 2007: Videosift Documentary Collective Created
July 2007: Tag Series is Completed
July 2007: Completed First Award winning Mahalo Search Result: E.O Wilson
September 2007: Throwawayyourtv.com forever closed and rerouted to AOL.
February 2008: Reached Diamond Level on VideoSift: 500 Published submissions.
February 2008: Retired from AOL Newsbloggers
February 2008: Hired Full Time with Mahalo.com
March 2008: Purchased Domain InternetResaerchLeague.com
May 2008: Siftography Published
June 2008: James Burke says my Mahalo work is “Masterly”
July 2008: Started jhoard.com
July 2008: Gave up on InternetResearchLeague.com
December 2008: Mahalo Answers Launches
January 2009: Karen and I opened the IdiocracyIndex.com
April 2009: Promoted to Community Manager of Mahalo Answers
June 2009: Sign a blogging contract with TrueSlant.com
I joined Twitter about a year ago when I started at Mahalo.com, I saw our CEO Jason Calacanis was always "tweeting" updates about the website so I figured it might be a great resource to get news from the boss, since I work remotely. The @jeffhoard isn't anything special, my tweets are pretty lame but I like that I am connected with most of the people I deem important in my corner of the web so it's a great resource for me.
When Kalane and I started Idiocracy Index we thought about the fact that we would be finding more stories then we could ever blog, so we setup a Twitter account to tweet idiocy, and added a huge feed to our blog. The feed is great because it means our website provides fresh information even if we haven't added a blog post. What really surprised me was the quick Twitter response, check out the follower count in less than a month, it's already surpassed my year old account. Join the insanity and follow @iidiocracy
Mahalo Answers has been out now for a few months and users are starting to get their first pay. The minimum payout on Mahalo is $40 and 53 users earned that much or more.
40 extra beans for simply sharing your knowledge with users and helping them find what they are looking for...on the internet...human powered search, huh, whodathunk it. Turns out there are lots of people who would pay a buck or two get and get a fast answer without having to dig into the depths of the Google.
Yes, and unlike the algorithms that preceded the human search, these humans that operate the human powered search engine have a conscious look no further than Mahalo Answers purple belt Robbrown asked users what they would do with their first Mahalo payout and suggested users could donate some to Kiva.org.
I thought it was a great idea, I joined his group and made a loan on behalf of the Mahalo Answers community on Kiva.
It's nice to see Jason's entrepreneurial spirit is being passed on through the very machine we operate in and use online earners can help third world startups, startups of necessity, have a chance at surviving on the other side of the world. ...Kumbaya...
Anyway, if your a Mahalo Answers member, even if you don't want to make a loan, be sure to Join the Kiva.org website and join the Mahalo Answers Team.
I mentioned some time ago on this blog that Kalane and I were working on a new blog project, well we started Idiocracy Index in January and spent some time tweaking, now we find ourselves posting to it with regularity. The Idiocracy Index! basically it's a great collection of articles and stories that serve as evidence to the dumbing down of our society, we work online in the field of research and the number of Idiocracy Index worthy articles we come across is staggering.
The blog is WordPress but we've also been using the Jing tool by Techsmith,which is a tool that makes it easy for us to take a screenshot and get it up on the blog quickly. It makes posting quite efficient and interesting. In the past you might only put a hyperlink or a quote, now you can take a picture of the screen as you see it....back in the day you'd have to hit "print+screen" > go to paint > save > upload...ugh, I'm glad those days are past us.
Did you hear about the Jackson Five Museum/Slavery Theme Park? Neither had we after we heard about it we archived it on the blog using Jing to take a screenshot. The other beauty of Jing is that it can take video. You have to pay a few extra bucks a month, but with one click you can to store videos you take of your screen, store them or even upload it to your YouTube account. We've been using both, Idiocracy Index has an active youtube channel. We use the provided storage for the videos we know will get removed from YouTube. We can also embed those "Video screenshots." Look at how nice this looks. Sure the audio is scratchy and maybe the quailty isn't HDTVXXX, but it's raw, I like it. It looks even better on the Idiocracy Index Blog.
The last element is a Twitter bar in the side, considering we catch more Idiocracy than we can chew, we'll be tweeting. We keep our followers informed on Idiocracy throughout the day without needing to write full blown blog pieces. If you are on Twitter you can follow us here.
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