The Next Web

Mahalo carefully gives the audience not so insane levels of control

Written on June 1, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Blog hero Jason Calacanis has announced on Calacanis.com that his human-powered search engine Mahalo will embrace the Wikipedia idea of letting anyone edit any page at any time. He explains why:

Jason Calacanis and his yellow Corvette

This feature has allowed everyone to get involved, even if their contribution is bad. The brilliance of this move is that the bad editors grow to be poor editors, and then poor editors then become average editors, and over some period of time some small percentage of the bad, poor, and average editors become great.

The obvious threats

I’ve happened to see the CEO of Wikia, Gil Penchina, speaking at The Next Web conference. He said that “when giving away insane levels of control is done right, it is incredibly strong“. Though he did mention the obvious dangers of welcoming everyone as an editor. Calacanis has experienced one of this threats himself:

A month or so ago I had a huge political figure by my office and I was showing him how Wikipedia works. I change his nationality from Irish-American to Greek-American and he was stunned that the vandalism stayed up there for so long (five days). Of course, I had to change it back… so it’s possible that it could have stayed there for a month or a year.

Wikipedia 3.0

So the Mahalo CEO decided to adopt a Wikipedia 3.0 model: anyone can edit the page, but experts have the final say. These experts are Mahalo editors whose full time job is to check all the changes made by Mahalo users. Yes, I said users, because in order to edit a page, you’ll have to register first. Also, Mahalo allows companies and individuals to correct the facts on their own page.

All in all, Mahalo carefully gives their users not so insane levels of control. Let’s see how this works out. If it succeeds, more companies might embrace the wisdom of crowds while checking all of their users’ moves. It simply isn’t as scary as giving your users insane levels of control.

I hope you like that post!

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gil penchina, Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, web 3.0, wikia, wikipedia

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Mahalo going after WikiPedia

Written on January 6, 2008 – 4:03 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Mahalo launched a new toolbar and introduced user created stubs yesterday. Users have always been able to post links to Mahalo. Now they can even build their pages themselves or collectively.

Users can create pages called “stubs” just like on Wikipedia. Mahalo didn’t bother to come up with a new name for their user generated pages which makes sense because most people understand “stubs”. Google came up with “Knol”, their own definition of a “stub”.

If you abuse Mahalo Stubs by spamming or inserting only your own links your account will be banned. Someone apparently will be checking all the Stubs. I wonder how spamproof & scalable this will be. As Mahalo grows it will become more and more interesting to start your own Mahalo ‘ShareTheLove’ linkfarm.

One interesting note: there is no word about these new features on the official Mahalo blog yet. Instead, the announcement was made on Calacanis’ personal blog and to his 5000+ Mahalo Twitter followers. It is sort of a open/closed beta launch I guess…

There is a large collection of Mahalo Stubs here:
http://www.mahalo.com/Category:User_Created_Stubs

One example:
http://www.mahalo.com/Apple_Rumors

Calacanis, Mahalo, search, stubs, wikipedia

2 Comments »