Google finally launched Knol today, like many other websites we are talking about a large content play.  To some extent, a concept pioneered by About.com and refined by Wikipedia and Mahalo. Authoritative users creating rich indexes of curated content.

In their battles for king of hill, they have all bowed to the same master in the form of Google. So now with Knol the game has changed a bit, after all the big G is the one sending most of the traffic to all these destinations. With Google, content web sites ride the millions of users who come in through just the right keyword. Higher on the hill search results page, the higher your traffic (also known as value).

So while yes there are a few questions, such as how will Google rank and integrate Knol pages into their search results? What about Google Adsense on Knol pages? One can’t help but feel like a bee trapped in someone else’s honey pot.

However I think Knol is not going to be major problem for others in the market. Lets take a look why.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Their index is simply too large and well placed in Google. Sure there is going to be more issues over the content, but that’s also what makes it great. Worst case, the openness and inaccuracies make it laughable like your local evening news. However a shit load of people still watch the local evening news and love it.

Mahalo

Mahalo is also going to do just fine. In fact there is going to be many more that take a similar approach to Mahalo. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery as they say. Having copycats in the market is also good, it means you are doing something right. Mahalo can also beat both Wikipedia and Knol in some areas simply because they will build out pages the others wont. Watch Google Trends for a bit sometime, you’ll find the majority users are more interested in their latest celebrity news as opposed to an authoritative article on a clogged toilet.

You

Yes you! Do you blog our create content online? Yes you’ll be OK too. In fact, you should be on Knol now creating content there. You can even generate adsense revenue within your pages, why let the these guys have all the fun? Better yet, create you own content portal, something under a very fine niche. Dominate the space and start chipping at these big guys for traffic (once again, value).

Whats others are saying:

• Danny Sullivian’s great roundup
  (if you read only one knol post this year…)
• Allen manages to record a video under 5 minutes!
• Jason on FriendFeed
• Matthew says aloha
• Graywolf is literally foaming at the mouth

Having spent some time behind the Mahalo curtain I can tell you,  Jason is not leaving the blog world anytime soon. Like many of us he simply suffers from Social Media ADD, jumping from one platform to another, courting one heavily, only to leave it behind a short time later.  That in mind, I give you the “Top 5 Reasons Jason Calacanis is NOT Quiting Blogging“.

5. His pagerank 6 blog has WAYYYY too much potential Google juice for Mahalo.

4. At some point, he is going to lose so much at the poker table he will have to sell blog roll links to settle his debt. Perhaps Ted can start Pay-Per-Poker to accommodate this.

3. He made an blog-illuminati type bet with Dave Winer, first one to stop blogging loses the Internet. Both these dudes are going to be posting from their death beds.

2. Taurus and Fondue aren’t quite ready to take the helm of the blog-o-sphere.

1. And the number one reason, if he quits blogging, he wont be able create these genius linkbait scenarios to get us all talking about him.

What Others are Saying:

• The Daily Flip
• Matthew Ingram
• Sarah Lacy

Photo by: The extremely talented and cool wmmarc.

Today is going to be my last day with Mahalo.com. The last 8 months here have been an amazing experience for me. Truly unique and rewarding on so many levels. Leaving it behind has been a very tough decision for me. Big thanks to Jason and C.K. for giving me a chance and some footing in this crazy industry. Huge respect and gratitude to the Mahalo staff, both in-house and the many remote guides. There is no shortage of great ideas and people here; I’m certainly going to miss it all.

So what’s next? Well I’m going over to Docstoc, an online document sharing website. I’ll be heading up their content and SMO/SEO efforts. They recently received a nice round of funding and are posed to break out. There are going to be some huge challenges at the new gig, I can’t wait to get started.

More details to follow when I get a chance.

Mahalo!

ps. Follow me on Twitter

This above image is search. Thats you stuck in the middle of it. The information you need may be as close as the nearby blue nodes. These are websites like Wikipedia and eventually Mahalo. Sometimes that information is deeper, on the green nodes. These are sites like Cooking.com and for the guys Chickipedia. Lastly we have the final stop, the purple nodes. This is the finest granular detail of search. It may appear in the form of a blog post, single news article or other form of user generated content.

Taking a search user all the way to that final purple node is not always required. There are of course plenty of nice stops along the way. For many of us however that central (or red node) is Google.

Right now Google search is the earth, the wind and even the fire. No one is going to change this anytime soon. Truth is they do everything so great, who would want to? There is however (as with everything), room for improvements in certain segments. This means a handful of useful services have the opportunity to at least disrupt Google’s dominance. To increase their presence and cause a little bit of blue node disruption.

Bernard Lunn over at RWW has a list of 11 trends that might disrupt Google. I want to add 3 more.

1. Intelligent Aggregation: Online content is already reaching a saturation point, in the future it will only get worse. Services that can swarm around related topics and cleanly present them will be huge. Present examples include services like TechMeme and Alltop.

2. Editorial Layers: A concept we have obviously deployed at Mahalo. It’s challenging and in some cases expensive, but necessary. When you get down to very granular niche searching, humans will always win.

3. User Generated Search: That actually scares me just to type… Wikia is going to be an interesting trail for this type of service. We also have an untapped amount of good usergen search data already. Right now it’s in the form of Digg/delicious voting based methods.

What are the other disruptions out there? Don’t say Twitter!

As I blogged about last week, Mahalo guide notes are now open for public editing. The guide notes are the small write ups for each topic that appear along the right hand side of the page. Lately we’ve expanded over 15,000 of our pages to include more content (200-500 worlds) and additional subsections. The result is very much a Google/Wikipedia mashup with only the best and most relevant content showcased.

Jason blogged about this earlier today toting it as Wikipedia 3.0. He points out that you can even edit your own (or your companies page) as well. This can be a beyond frustrating experience on Wikipedia as I’m sure many of you already know.

Ryan Spoon also had a few thoughts on accountability and transparency. Both are something we discuss heavily when thinking about the future of Mahalo.

To get started simply login and look for the link in the bottom of any guide note as seen to the right. To insure quality updates every change will be monitored by our staff. The hope is we can add that all important layer of public participation without sacrificing quality and of course accuracy.

We have also made our internal activity page public. Here you can see everything coming into Mahalo and how it was handled.

Please let me know your thoughts and feedback on this in the comments.

Jason is down in Australia this week for CeBIT and just dropped an announcement about something we’ve been working on lately. Since I started at Mahalo I’ve typically recieved the same two questions over and over again:

1. Is it really crazy to work for Jason?
   and
2. How do you plan to scale?

Of course the first answer is yes, and the second a bit more complicated. One of the techniques is naturally going to be pulling resources from the public at large. Soon every guide note (the 200+ word write up on each page) will be editable to the public. This means users who are an authority on a subject (or just passionate about it) can add even more than just their favorite links.

Now we have to look at services like Wikipedia even closer to see how to manage something like this. Mostly to learn what not to do. I’ve always been a huge opponent of the “anonymous questionable librarian like army” that rules Wikipedia. To create quality content you need some type of editorial layer (if not multiple). So we have dedicated staff to oversee every edit that comes in to verify data when necessary. We need to constantly address the issue of bias content but avoid the lame edit wars. All while doing it as transparent and fair as human-poweredly possible.

What are your thoughts?

For those who have been watching the Mahalo Vlog Idol contest we are now down to our final 6! For those who have been wondering “how long are they going to string this along” the answer is not much longer! Jason is asking folks to create some blogs posts and rank your favorites. We are also looking for any feedback to help make the final decision. Since I work at Mahalo I’ll refrain from listing my favorites **cough** SARAH ATWOOD **cough** and embed the 6 videos below in order of appearance.

Who is your favorite? Please blog about it or leave a comment on the Mahalo Daily website. I added the Seesmic video comment earlier this week there so you can record your feedback as well.

Leah D’Emilio

Michelle Hummel

Nadine Heimann

Sarah Atwood

Kristina Allison

Andrea Rene

Related Links:

• The Famous ConnectedGeek’s Picks
• Reacutate says vote Andrea Rene
• The FemGeek’s Choices
• Tony Andrew Meyer on Mahalo VLOG Idol
• Frank Watson rates the Finalists
• VOTE NOW for your favorite!

You may have already read over on Jason’s blog that Mahalo is looking for a great system engineer in los angeles. As our traffic keeps growing its more and more important we have the right people behind it, manning the systems and keeping everything running smoothly.

Here is the job description:

Please send your deets to jason at mahalo.com and cc mark at mahalo.com with the subject line “I kick ass“

Systems Engineer, Los Angeles
Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world’s #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), and others. This kind of opportunity is extremely rare in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.

We’re looking for a seasoned Systems Engineer. You should be expert in massively scalable architectures, how MySQL and Linux interact, how MySQL and memcache interact, sharding, replication (including multiple
master replication) and how to tune MySQL based on various schemas for maximum performance and availability. You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter with the “general get it factor”. You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.

You should be expert with:
Applications: PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.x, memcache 1.2.x
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, Unicast and Multicast socket programming
Scripting languages: Unix shell scripting
Other languages: Applicants with C, Java, and Objective-C experience preferred
Bonus: Hadoop / HBase, Lucene, Nutch, Spread

As a bonus, if you can help find the right person we are offering a $1000 bonus and tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch50 event (a $2000 value). We have a great team at Mahalo is there someone out there up for the task?

One of the more anticipated games of this year decade, Grand Theft Auto 4 is getting released on Tuesday. At Mahalo we plan to pickup the game at midnight Monday night and immediately tear into it. One fun thing about being at a place like Mahalo is Jason pretty much gives us free will to experiment with new ideas for the content. Back when Super Smash Bros was released I came up with the idea to setup a Ustream Channel and stream some live game play. This turned out to be a huge success, we saw waves of people come into the chat and participating with the content. Feeding links into the chat with an RSS to IRC script also proved to be a very valuable way from driving qualified traffic to Mahalo.

So naturally we plan to do the same this time around, check out the GTA4 Live Stream page or the below embeds on April 29, 2008 (12 AM - 8 AM).

While we all wait to get our hands on this delicous carnage take a look at some of the current pages from the Grand Theft Auto 4 Category:

Related Posts:

• Grand Theft Auto IV bittorrent download
• GTA4 Explosion of Walkthroughs, Leaks, Cheats, etc.
• Leaked GTA4 Videos

At Mahalo we just rolled out rolled out Microformats for relevant search result pages. So what does this mean, and what are Microformats? Well, they are data classes that help machines and people identify and export information. Data such as contacts and address information is much easier to manage, search engines can also better catalog the info. Yes a little bit of the semantic web of tomorrow….today!

Getting Started:

1. Firefox users can download the Operator plugin to get instant Microformats support.

2. Visit the Paris Hotels page on Mahalo

3. Notice the Operator plugin in the top left of the below image. Every hotel featured on the page is now available for quick and easy export. You also get a few other nice features like quick access to mapping websites. Get the data you need and drop it into your address book and phone with a few clicks.

So obviously this type of feature can only apply to certain types of information. However for data it can be used with there is a lot of potential. Microformats has yet to see it’s “tipping point” like RSS but Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 9 have been rumored to be including native support. Now we need to really figure out what other types of data to map and how to make it even easier for our users. More info to “follow” on this soon.

Special thanks to Tantek who took the time to come by the Mahalo HQ and share Microformats with the staff.

More discussion at: Mashable, Jason and C.K.