Mahalo
Mahalo is Jason Calacanis’s new web directory (though he calls it a search engine). I still don’t quite get Mahalo, though the fact that I’m still occasionally trying to says something about either the concept’s inherent quality or Jason’s ability to generate buzz. No offense intended, but I honestly think it’s the later.
On his blog, Jeff Jarvis talks about his pseudo nomination for ombudsman for the service, as per Calacanis’s original call for it. On the blog I say:
It seems your desire Jeff runs counter to much of the concept behind Mahalo. As I see it: Mahalo does not want to be open, it is a gatekeeper. But it’s an introductory gatekeeper, not an all-encompassing one, and those can be good.
A best of both worlds might be an automatically generated page of submitted links that exists underneath/in-relationship to the main page. It can be toggled on or off. The good: you would see the submission immediately, which avoids the “it’s so one-way” Jeff doesn’t care for. The bad: it can be spammed, which is what Mahalo is fighting. By keeping it as a toggled on/off section in relationship to the main page, you would still keep the editorial control (and that’s certainly what Mahalo is doing), but would have a wild-west links page to reference if you want to dig deeper.
Frankly, that would also be a boon to this potential ombudsman. Users see bias in how an editor is running their page. They call on the ombudsman, who has a reference/starting point for investigating the claim.
Later, Calacanis himself talks about Mahalo not being for the TechCrunch elite. This is even more interesting to me, as I generally agree with that approach. Or rather, if not aiming for the fat portion of the curve, aiming for a different portion than the usual Web 2.0 startup. However, Calacanis raises an interesting point:
However, the truth is if you’re part of the .001% of the web you probably know that if you want travel information the best nine sites are TKTKTKTK, TKTKTK, etc. You probably know that to find information about bittorrent clients you should go to DownloadSquad and LifeHacker.
How is Mahalo going to handle “gray market,” or even “black market” information?
Will the Anarchist’s Cookbook be on Mahalo in some form? Thats maybe an easy legal decision, you don’t want to see people getting a home made molotov cocktail from a Mahalo recipe. And information legally subject to a legitimate take-down notice would again probably be an easy decision. But what about information big business maybe doesn’t care for, but is still legal. Will the best way to get torrents be on Mahalo? What about content between legal, generic torrent content and that extra legal cocktail?