{ Category Archives }
Mahalo
What I’ve been doing recently
-Producing Mahalo Daily, an online video show hosted by Veronica Belmont. I research show ideas, arrange for press passes, book interviews and events, and pitch in with the camera when needed.
-Living in Santa Monica, a few blocks away from Mahalo.
-Reading Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly.
-Visiting Santa Monica beach as often as I can.
-Watched The Room at the end of last month. You should watch our interview with the director, Tommy Wiseau.
-Visited NYC with the family who flew over from England. Saw Cai Guo-Qiang’s amazing exhibition at the Guggenheim, met up with Jeff Jarvis at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, met up with Randall Bennett at CNET (join the 404’s Facebook group!), checked out MoMA and took a pic of my favorite painting, saw MacBeth at the Brooklyn Academy, saw the Bill of Rights, ate lots of Pizza and took lots of cab and subway rides. It was a really great trip.
Google Knols and its relation to the NUJ / Journalism
In response to a question on the NUJ New Media email list.Â
Google is clearly eyeballing Wikipedia with Knol. (Disclosure: I work for Mahalo.com - many people have cast Google’s Knol as a direct response to Mahalo)
The key questions that journalists and the NUJ as a whole should be asking here is: will there be any vetting of content? Will writers be paid?
The NUJ always seems to be at least couple of steps behind with everything related to the web. Jeremy Dear wrote today/yesterday that bloggers should be thinking about joining the union. That might have been a relevant statement two or three years ago. And it’s still irrelevant today considering the farce of a process that is “applying to the NUJ”.
An entirely new form of publishing is rapidly being built through companies like Wikia, Squidoo, Digg, Mahalo, etc. Technically, we have 3,000 part time employees at Mahalo on top of the 50 in house guides - all of them are getting paid to write. The numbers at other sites are even bigger. Mahalo’s numbers could be 10-100x bigger in 4 years.
5 years ago, it was unheard of for people to get paid to blog. 6 months ago, it was unheard of for people to get paid to write search pages.
If the NUJ is really serious about its role of defending workers AND new media, it should be completely on top of every single new development where people get paid to write online. They should be reaching out to people and asking them if they need help with dealing with their employee(s). The application process to the NUJ should be as simple as clicking a link.
Mahalo and SEO
It’s pretty clear that the SEO guys don’t like Mahalo, the new “human search engine” from Jason Calacanis and his team of guides/developers. So much so that the site doesn’t even appear on the front page of Google, after an apparent 1 million page views within 48 hours. What this demonstrates is not SEO’s power (Mahalo will eventually appear as the top search result on Google, no doubt about it), but the pettiness of the people behind it. Mahalo.com deserves to be the first result, as it’s undoubtedly the most relevant result. By attempting, and temporarily succeeding, in breaking this logic, SEO people have revealed their true colour as complete sleazebags.
