The Tao Of Joe

Jason Calacanis has linked to this post from the sidebar of his home page in his “my del.icio.us” links, thanks Jason! A little link love from a post by Jason would really help boost the Technorati Authority but hey any love is good love! So in the spirit of “it’s is deja vu all over again” as Yogi Berra said, today’s post is the same as my June 21, 2007 post, almost. Stop by in the comment section and tell Joe Tao what you think of Mahalo.

In trying to decide what topic I would post about this morning (21 June, 2007) I reviewed a half dozen other websites and blogs since I got up at 4:30am this morning. I found myself almost posting what would amount to as a Jason Calacanis fanboy post and then stopped once I realized what I was actually doing. That said, Jason is always up to something interesting and his blog is usually informative and entertaining at the same time while giving you an inside view of his corner of Silicon Valley and also his broader perspective of Web technology and it’s direction world wide. Oh, and he is also a great study for the art of self-promotion (understatement intended).

Jason’s current project is “Mahalo” which describes itself as a “human powered search engine”. It reminds me of the original Yahoo directory back in 1994-95. I remember going around to colleagues PC’s and hooking them up with Mozilla and then Netscape browsers on their PC’s. I would then point their home or start page to Yahoo.com so that they could get off and running on the internet. Prior to my arrival all they had been using the internet for was email and maybe gopher to find a little extra information to supplement a report. Once they started using Yahoo it was all over, peoples productivity went downhill fast but at least everyone was really excited about the possibilities of the brave new World Wide Web.

But wait, Mahalo isn’t like Yahoo was back then, we are human based search results. I hear you - I really, really, really hear you over there at Mahalo headquarters. But the fact is it still looks like the search results we had back then in terms of quality, yes, Yahoo was machine search based but you didn’t have to wade through spam or advertising the first several years during the mid-nineties. I know because I was there and we really did have a utopian internet free of the market forces driving the internet today. Of course if it weren’t for the interest of entrepreneurs of Jason Calacanis’s caliber back then it wouldn’t have grown into the huge force that the web is today, I’ll grant you that.

I like what I see over at Mahalo and will keep checking in for now but as Jason Calacanis himself knows, Mahalo can’t possibly compete or hope to be a replacement for Google. They just might become a first stop for the most popular search terms and that in the end is what Mahalo is all about.

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