Mahalo is the current startup that Jason Calacanis was working on post-Netscape. Since then, he’s received a lot of feedback from users and has done a pretty decent job accomodating everyone’s needs.

In a nutshell, Mahalo is a human-powered search engine/reference source that rejects spammy Web sites and links users to relevant content.

Mahalo aims to provide content that is superior to Google, Yahoo or Live because there is no algorithm to exploit. As long as you have a page that offers value for an article, an editor will post it on an article after vetting it for junk.

Here are 10 reasons why you should ‘Mahalo’ your next search:

1. Spam-Free Results. All pages on Mahalo link you to content that is interesting and useful like videos, blogs and news articles.
2. Minimal Advertising. Because there are editors on staff who are probably compensated… they must pay for the work. The ads are relvate and targeted to the content to via a reputable vendor, Amazon.
3. Easy to Use. Just search and click, that’s all there is to it. It’s also easy to submit links for review.
4. Spammers hate Mahalo. This is why you should use it instead of landing on spam-blogs (splogs).
5. Relevant like Wikipedia, but Not as Boring. The relevancy of articles to links is equivalent to that of Wikipedia, but the composition and display of well-formed articles looks way better.
6. Dynamic. The Mahalo homepage changes frequently linking you to hot topics that people are discussing.
7. Not too Geeky. The variety of content that Mahalo hosts is diverse allowing anyone with virtually any interest find useful content. That is, from Paris Hilton to Tasers — Mahalo has you covered.
8. Mahalo Connects Your Social Networks Together. When you submit content to Mahalo, you have the opportunity to share submissions with your friends and contacts on other social networks that you’re connected with.
9. Stop Searching! Mahalo doesn’t force you to dig for relevant results. You just get them.
10. Mahalo is Interesting, Useful and Accessible. I say Mahalo is interesting because I can find content for stuff I like but didn’t know existed; I say it’s useful because I can save time and find answers when I’m in a hurry; I say accessible because it doesn’t read as an encyclopedia.

Of course, those are just my opinions.

You may have other reasons why you might like it, so check it out.  The only thing that Mahalo lacks is speed. I imagine as users access it more and submit content, Mahalo will scale their Greenhouse to more people so articles get updates more frequently. I trust that as Mahalo nears for their GM stage, it should be the authoritative, human-powered search engine firing on all eight cylinders.

I really have no other thoughts on this, except for a “Thank you.” Actually, I do have some tidbits to share on this.

Allowing users to control and better manage their data will probably help them control it better and understand the impact of inputting such data. You know, that kind of “Oh.” feeling when you realized you sent a mass-email to the whole office without the attachment.

While retaining user-contributed data and holding it hostage does help/mislead users into thinking you’re valuable, it doesn’t make them happier. I mean, look at AOL. Still to this day, a user can not easily export their address book, PFC and favorites to the real Internet. It is because of this a number of AOLers — whomever is left on the service — continue to stay.

It’s nice to see MySpace actually doing something good, first and in favor of their users. As usual, anything MySpace does, Facebook has to do (better). Let the information gathering, sharing and mashing up, begin!

Shawn Christopher tweeted, “Time to look for a new search engine [...] I REALLY hate ads on things.” This totally summed up my thoughts in less than 140 characters.

Ads are not the enemy. Let me just make that clear before I go into yet another diatribe about advertising. I am completely content with companies monetizing services, heck, I don’t mind paying for them, but when ads visually distract people and literally just waste bandwidth, and offer no opt-out, it hurts me.

Google used to be the king of innovation and encouraged creativity, but decisions like this shows us who they are: another Internet company looking to sell ad inventory. It’s not like we haven’t heard of those before, have we?

What about creative and innovative sponsorship campaigns? I’m no advertising genius, but it wouldn’t be too intrusive to create a variety of Coke-themed homepage skins and promote changing homepage skins and let people get a nice red and black coke-themed Google experience.

Contextual text advertising works fine. I’m not nearly as bothered by text advertising as I am about graphical advertising. While text ads don’t jump out and blink and subliminally make me click them, I am more likely to act on a text ad that meets my needs. You see, Google did a decent job turning the Internet advertising industry on its head and running with it.

I don’t dispute that text ads are more susceptible to click fraud, but what isn’t? Text ads have also been losing some steam in terms of ROI, but that’s only because it was pushed down people’s throats by irresponsible publishers (Splogs). Clearly, that’s a turn-off for any Web surfer.

I sincerely hope Google doesn’t turn into what I illustrate below. In any case, i strongly advocate to surfers to use Mozilla Firefox + Adblock Plus to block ads on the internet.

The future of Google? Let’s hope not.

CNET was at the Web 2.0 Expo and interviewed a lot of great folks on their definition of “Cloud Computing,” as it relates to Web 2.0.

My definition of cloud computing would probably be like this:

Cloud Computing is the infrastructure where backend processes are unified, open and accessible for third-parties to transmit and receive data, effectively scaling the size, data and functionality of a network exponentially as users contriubte data. Essentially, Cloud Computing is the process to conjoin two proprietary networks at the hip and make it run a marathon.

Good? Bad? WTF? I’m interested in what’s on your mind, hollar in the comments below!

[Image, thunderhead ahead! on Flickr]

Which begs the question — what good are traffic cameras if they can’t adequately avert safety risks?

Traffic cameras are beneficial for short-term revenue, and that’s all there is to it.

Maybe when Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio isn’t aggressively enforcing federal immigration laws, he might be able to dedicate human resources who are tasked to enforce traffic laws who can probably react much quicker to violators. (Probably much quicker than five months) if someone traveled at almost twice the speed limit.

Traffic cameras can’t slow someone down who speeds with malice;
Traffic cameras can’t stop someone who runs a red light with distraction;
Traffic cameras can’t prevent fatalities;
But at least they make money.

Anyhow, DMX is not a stranger to traffic enforcement. According to Arizona State Court Records, in 2005, he drove without a license, made an illegal left turn, lacked proof of vehicle insurance; all plead guilty and paid the imposed fines. Later that year, DMX drove on a suspended license, and possessed illegal lighting on his license plate (probably via those ridiculous glow kits) — and ultimately failed to appear in court — but eventually his lawyer worked a deal out with the city to drop those charges.

In 2006, he drove a vehicle without registration or insurance and later that year again.

In 2008, today, he was charged with: Excessive speed (20MPH+), No vehicle registration, failure to appear to court, failure to produce his driver license, reckless driving, driving with a suspended license, failure to produce insurance. AZ MVD has placed a hold on the vehicle (’68 Chevy Nova) until he shows in court.

Can’t MVD just revoke his license if he doesn’t obey the law? I guess not if he’s a musician who’s career is at an all-time low.

There are literally hundreds of stops on the Internet subway.
You might as well be honest that you stink and need to clean up.
***

The truth is, there isn’t a lot of transparency in online communities. From unexpected product changes, hidden product features all the way to content enforcement — these topics matter to users online. MySpace, for example, lives a pretty shielded life from their users. As a MySpace user, I haven’t been able to find a feedback area or any way to learn about what new features are coming out.

As Pirillo pointed out, it takes a lot of work to be transparent. A community manager must always decide the level of exposure something is worth discussing in addition to anticipating the community response and balancing the sum. Sometimes the issues own you, sometimes you own the issues. It’s OK to not be correct all the time. Most users are willing to forgive mistakes, not silence. In my former work blog, I admit it was a struggle to balance the needs of the users and the needs of the business, but I managed to keep several thousand people happy. There are so many audiences to consider when communicating a would-be elementary message.

Here are a few simple ways to be transparent with users of an online community:

• Refrain From E-mail Blasts. Most social networked users almost explicitly use internal social network messaging with each other, with a higher attention span. If e-mails are necessary, at least segment your recipients to receive somewhat relevant content in it.
• Give Plenty of Notice to Service Changes. I’d say give one to two weeks notice before changing something on the service. This is ample time for a community manager to guage the community response, tweak it if needed as help inform as much of your users without drawing “panic” responses.
• Use Your Own Platform. I find it baffling that some social networks don’t openly use their own platform to communicate service changes. When you use your own service, people generally believe you have faith in it. If you used it effectively, you shouldn’t need to worry about PR, since the Internets will pick it up for you.
• Be Engaged in Your Users, Service and Reputation. It’s great to talk about your products and services, but follow-up and participate with your community.
• Listen to Your Community Manager(s). When running business ideas by Community Managers, be sure to interpret their input as if it was a business P/L analyst. They may be timid, but they can anticipate user response like no other industry research could. We’re softer but more passionate in the business world I guess.

Oh, and on a final note: If you are going to stand up a blog up for your community, please try to keep the dust off. Users like content that is dynamic, with new content no less than weekly.

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, customer service, engagement

I can’t blame Comcast for helping, either. It’s cost-effective (free), useful, scalable and accessible.

At the heart of the article, Josh twittered:

Comcast isn’t letting me hop online without installing something on my computer. No thank you.

And approximately three hours later, ComcastCares responded with:

@Josh The initial setup establishes your user name info and the MAC address for the modem to initialize. send me an email we can bybass

(Yes, “bypass” was misspelled, but this inaccuracy reflects a real human on the other side.)

At the surface some might say this is just good PR or “brand management.” This would be true if a customer uncovered something as egregious as the experience Vincent Ferrari had with AOL, or the infamous Comcast Technician Sleeping video. Legitimately, there is a need for companies out there to engage their customers — no matter how important (or unimportant) they may seem.

So how does ComcastCares do this, surely they don’t read every Tweet, right? They probably use a scanner like TweetScan to scan for anything with “Comcast” or “Com cast” to find customers venting, usually in need of empathetic and responsive customer support. (Another great thing with the Twitter API, their agents can simultaneously use it under one account.)

This makes me warm inside to see a large company leverage social media for customer service, and all under 140 characters or less and without a huge outbreak of chaos.

From the lede of CNET’s coverage, If Jim Brady had his way, there would be no guaranteed anonymity for those who post comments to Washingtonpost.com.

The Washington Post has dipped their feet into allowing anonymous comments on various news articles, but as expected, they’ve experienced an on-going frustration with Trolls. Their most critical of users usually suggest the usual censorship or a handful of the variety of political conspiracy theories involving WaPo, Republicans and Democrats.

I understand their plight. They want comments, but just not those ones. The honest truth is, it’s their audience and they need to embrace it and find some way to earn participation from the readers who actually have some semblance of online candor to their name.

The executive editor of the Washington Post, Jim Brady, shares his thoughts and struggles in promoting a positive community — but the gem of his proposal is strategically buried at the bottom of the CNET article:

“I don’t know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver’s
license or passport, but I think making people responsible would raise
the level of discourse.”

That is, a traditional news agency asking for your address, payment method or a copy of your traveling documents? Yikes! The idea that an oft-criticized news agency would solicit personal identification is just stoking the fire for your critics. Be careful, Brady.

I don’t sense any malice in his suggestion — I do sense fear and I see his concern for the dying breed (traditional news and the “write to the editor”-style feedback.)

Of course, there are other ways to provide verified identities of users without soliciting government-issued, or financially-backed documents. For example, cell phones and text messaging, e-mail verification, Heuristics, IP addresses. In addition, they could employ disemvoweling to remove a troll’s contributions (almost literally), as well as the usual “profanity list” and its variants to avert some  of the offensive discussion.

Jim, you walk a fine line here between a passionate community and no community. One of the grey areas in providing positive communities is to moderate commentary and set clear guidelines. Here’s a hint: It’s very costly, I know cause it eventually cost my former job, but it would offer a balanced, critical and engaged community that you and your advertisers would want.

Question: Would you be content in providing a photo copy of your government-issued ID in order to participate in discussion on the Internet?

Share your perspective in the comments below. (And yes, anonymous responses are OK.)

A little over a year ago, you could say that I was sort of thrown under the bus by the new “enhancement” by AOL to include advertisements within all outgoing e-mails. At the time, the company gave no word on the rather baffling decision to include ads in e-mail; which left a blogger with nothing more than speculation (something you don’t do on a corporate blog) and as expected, upset and disgruntled users.

Since the inception of including AOL-branded advertisements in e-mail, there was a little PR mess, allegedly, AOL’s Corporate Communications responded to criticism, justified such intrusions into their subscriber’s e-mail, citing AOL users were surveyed — unsurprisingly, no one has (to this day) admitted to taking that survey, and eventually silence.

Fast-forward to today. It appears AOL will be permitting AOL users to choose if they want to sell advertising on their personal, private and business conversations. In the screenshot below (courtesy from an AOLer), they documented the option provided by the former Dulles, VA, now New York based company.

So where is this undocumented, unannounced, hidden setting? Sources indicate AOL Keyword: FOOTER is the place to go to change these settings, within the legacy AOL software. If you’re one of the lucky few, you would get something like this:

Of course, if you represent the unlucky majority, you still get to flaunt AOL’s advertisements in all your communications with your family, friends and co-workers. Pictured below is what you’ll receive if you aren’t allowed to disable AOL e-mail ads:

The URL to access this feature is
http://controls.api-mail.aol.com/mailcontrols/app/en-US/FooterControl.html

For those lucky enough to not be forwarded chain mail lately, or those who have been successful migrating your friends and family on over to GMail, here is what an e-mail may look like with the ads AOL inserted for all subscribers, unilaterally, with no choice to opt-out (stroked in red):

I did some sleuthing on this feature. Did AOL even attempt to notify users about this — at least a Beta test or anything? No. The URL in and of itself leads me to believe AOL will start letting third-parties access your e-mail (hopefully, with your explicit consent) under their new Open API program, under the newly refined “AOL Developer Network,” which basically consists of six AOL developers making applications and not getting compensated for their works. This leads to the more important question — will AOL sell real estate on your private, personal and professional e-mail to a third party, if you use a non-AOL interface (like Facebook using an AOL Mail mashup)?

In any case, people will do just about anything if it’s free. But that’s an entirely different topic.

— UPDATE 9:40PM MST —
An AOLer contacted AOL Support regarding disabling advertisements. Their official response (canned) is:

Dear <ScreenName>,

My name is <CCC NAME>.  I would like to thank you for writing and making us aware of your concern.

I understand you have concerns about the free services that AOL offers appearing at the bottom part of your outgoing e-mail.

The short message that is now included at the bottom of your emails is a reminder of AOL’s free services, including AOL email. We considered the addition of this message very carefully, just as we will consider your feedback.

You can disable the e-mail message footer in one of these three ways:
-  Via Keyword: Footer through AOL clients 9.1 and below.
-  By logging into http://controls.api-mail.aol.com/mailcontrols/app/en-US/FooterControl.html.
-  Via AOL WebMail by going to “Settings” then “Compose.” (Coming Soon)

We highly value what our members have to say. We use feedback like this to make improvement to the service. Many of the changes made throughout the years have been the result of ideas offered to us by members just like you.

Thank you for writing to us.

<CCC FIRST NAME>
Customer Care Consultant
AOL Member Services

—

— UPDATE MAY 8, 2008  6:44 PM MST —

After further analysis, it appears that AOL Keyword: Footer is restricted to paying AOL users. Never fear, this one is easy to circumvent.

1. Go to  http://bill.aol.com/ and sign in as usual.
2. Update your payment method to a credit card and add one in. (They won’t charge it).
3. Go to  http://changeplan.aol.com/ and choose a plan (any plan). I used the $9.95 one.
4. Go to AOL Keyword: FOOTER, and opt out of the mail footer ad.
5. Go back to  http://changeplan.aol.com and change your plan back to FREE AOL / CANCEL AOL.
6. Go to  http://bill.aol.com/ and scroll down to the bottom to confirm that you have a pending price plan change to “AOL” or “Free AOL.”
7. Go to  http://marketingpreferences.aol.com/ and opt-out of the marketing that AOL signed up up for without your permission.

After a number of AOL users have provided me feedback, it appears that the only people who are on the Free AOL plans are not able to access AOL Keyword: Footer. I did some testing and volunteered my own credit card to test this, and after I switched to a paid-AOL plan, I was able to disable my mail ads. I reverted back to Free AOL and the lack of mail ads setting held. Sorry, I’m not switching to AOL, I still use GMail. If a service makes you jump though all those hoops to disable their ads isn’t worth having.
—

AOL USERS: IF AOL KEYWORD: FOOTER WORKS FOR YOU (OR NOT), PLEASE SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE IN THE COMMENTS BELOW.

[Credit for discovering this feature is to JadeIce1119 and "Dee"]

~Joe

Yahoo tanks downward (-14.16%), as Microsoft holds steady (-0.1%), and Time Warner rises (+10.21).

It appears as Yahoo and Time Warner engage in talks more, investors support the idea of Yahoo acquiring the Internet unit from Time Warner. Microsoft holds it almost dead even despite withdrawing their offer. Investors obviously don’t think that was a wise move by Yahoo.

[Graph provided by Google Finance.]