Actually, I've said many times from the start of Mahalo that it is 1/3rd Wikipedia, 1./3rd search, and 1/3rd other.
In terms of rehashing the event I simply think it was rude of you to yell at me in the middle of my presentation. If you had waited until the Q&A like a, well, normal person it would have been fine by me. That's just how people behave--it's common courtesy.
I love debate and you know that. We've debated 100's of times and I've never had a problem with that. No one is afraid of taking me on--that's a joke. People write blog posts all the time challenging what I say. So, let's not pretend this is some kind issue with me silencing people. People can attack me as often as they like. Screaming from the back row? Well, that's just rude as I've said. I've spoken at events for over a decade and only one person in that time has ever yelled at me: you.
I accepted your apology... move on dude! Life is short..
Best Jason
dave
· 1 year ago
Let's talk about Mahalo and the role people play in your strategy. If you want, ask someone else from your company to come here and discuss it. I agree there's a lot of baggage betw you and me, and I don't want to rehash any of it. I wanted to be clear, you are a vendor, and have a product that requires discussion, not on the terms that you want to discuss it. Be a gentleman Jason and back off.
sean percival
· 1 year ago
Dave,
I've made some updates to your page to correct the error and include new content. Why don't you recommend some links as well? ;)
Take care, Sean
dave
· 1 year ago
Thanks for making those changes.
I assume you're paid a salary and get benefits and stock options to do this work.
If so, when you ask me to suggest some links, you're basically asking me to work for free, right? So your stock can be worth more as well as the other shareholders of your company?
Now I do this for a lot of companies, I know when I'm doing it I'm being a chump, but if I love the product, I do it anyway. But...
Sorry, not only don't I love your product, even if I did, I doubt I'd help the company.
PJ
· 1 year ago
"The priesthood of developers who can make scalable apps is about to burst into flames." "I think Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and EC2 etc point in that direction."
Surely even more so are apps like Aestiva HTML/OS, and similar, which enable non-coders to create sophisticated interactive websites.
Colin Walker
· 1 year ago
Dave,
I must agree that the premise of Mahalo is not as laid out in its description.
I had pretty much let the web 2.0 thing pass me by but thought I needed to get involved or get left behind so started checking out the various startups to see what was going on.
The initial idea behind Mahalo sounds good but once I started reading exactly what it was I figured that it was essentially a selection of a groups favourite links on any given subject as long as that subject fell within the web's "top searches" and not a "web search" as the button indicates. You are searching a database rather than the live web and the results you get are arbitrarily decided in accordance with their guidelines.
Personally I would rather wade through a normal search engine to find the little gems and nuggets from small sites that may not have been around long than be spoon fed a list.
Joe Pruitt
· 1 year ago
Not that I'm picking a side on the whole Cala-Winer gate thing, but I do find it interesting that you equate "reviewing his product unfavorably" as yelling out "PRODUCT SPAM, PRODUCT SPAM" in the middle of his presentation at Gnomedex. I was there and I saw this more as "heckling" than "reviewing".
I'm aware you were vocal about your opinions on Mahalo and it's business model, but I don't remember that in the hall at Gnomedex. Jason obviously had an agenda with his presentation and that was to promote his new site. Heckling, in my opinion, is not cool. If you had a problem with the content, you should have taken it up with Chris afterwards and not tried to disrupt the presentation.
I didn't mean this as a personal attack, so hopefully you didn't take it this way. I just wanted to point out my observation of the happenings. It was my understanding from Jason's blog that the bad feelings on his part were from the heckling and not any other reviews/opinions you had about his site.
dave
· 1 year ago
I wrote a lot about Mahalo here on Scripting News. That's what I was referring to in today's post.
Second, you put in quotes and all caps things that I didn't say and you didn't accurately explain what happened there. Want to rehash it, okay, but lets get both sides equal time, and let's get some other witnesses in here, including people in the chat room, and on twitter, and other people who spoke out *before* I did. Let's get Jason's full transcript and his slides including his "Fuck Nick Denton" line, which he repeated. Rude? I think so and I thought so at the time. Let's get the other people who made comments from the audience during other presentations without waiting for the Q&A, and without waiting to be recognized.
You don't want to rehash it? Good, let's talk about software and UGC, and how we want to go forward with this stuff.
John Furrier
· 1 year ago
what do you mean by this comment? "we could and should be cutting more fair deals with the people who create the value on the net, and we're not doing it. "
I think Mahalo is being challenged everyday and they work on their product value proposition to meet those challenges...if not then Jason will be just a promoter not an entrepreneur. If the product sucks it won't get traction. Jason seems to be working hard on the product. Being compared to wikipedia isn't a bad thing and I don't think Jason is running away from that. However being venture backed comparing yourselft to Google helps increase your valuation...
btw: i'm working on the next google too. :-)
andrewbaron
· 1 year ago
John, when you say "If the product sucks it won't get traction. " I disagree in this case. I see Mahalo as being a business plan that is just like spam-mail - you can make big money even when the majority of the people hate it. So the reason why Im not at all interested in Mahalo, even if they go on to make hundreds of millions of dollars, is because of the DNA of the project - the main reason for its existence is not to be helpful, it's higher purpose is spam money.
Also, why invest so many millions of dollars to make a website with the top 10,000 search terms when you could do so much more for free with just 1000 people who volunteer to do 10 each?
andrewbaron
· 1 year ago
Woops, sorry, the first comment didnt take but then it did so I rewrote :)
andrewbaron
· 1 year ago
My argument against Mahalo has always been similar, I think the product is a lame product that no one needs. However, I disagree with your statement: "If the product sucks it won't get traction." When it comes to the complacent, which is the target audience for Mahalo, I think its just like spam: Most people HATE spam, but its a very lucrative business when you do it just right.
I just dont understand why anyone would invest $20M. Why not just get 1000 people together to each write 10 articles. That might take all of a weekend or two to knock out.
Maybe we should at least give it a try, it could be easy to round people up if there was enough of a challenge.
dave
· 1 year ago
Andrew, that's where I'm going with this, your conclusion. Maybe we, as users, should pick off one of the huge market-cap UGC companies, and build what they have, but do it as a co-op where we share 100 percent of the equity. I don't know what kind of deal a guy like JC gets, but what exactly is he doing to earn his stock?
One of the things that led me to this is the writer's strike in Hollywood. They're concerned that the big media companies are going to make a huge amount of money on the Internet and not give them any of it. I can see why they're concerned. So why not start their own companies, and make all the money and give none of it to the suits. Also the programmers, what are they doing that's so special that entitles them to huge chunks of equity? And why don't we, the users, get some of that equity? Hell, why don't we get *all* of it?
andrewbaron
· 1 year ago
I think the incentive is pretty high. If the very conservative investors were willing to put in $20M for this, the value has got to be so huge that we all stand to make a lot - so the incentive is still prob great enough, even when fractioned out by 10,000 to get everyone to do it. It sounds like kind of a fun challenge.
dave
· 1 year ago
I don't know. The whole thing still sounds silly. A bunch of landing pages designed to rank high in Google searches. How long before Google caught on to what we were doing and figured out how to:
1. Filter our pages out.
2. Replace them with their own pages with their own ads on them.
Either we're leaving a lot of money on the table, or the investors got a bad deal.
dave
· 1 year ago
We should be sharing more than kudos with the creative people and more than revenue too. That's the next bubble that bursts, imho, it'll soon be possible for people to set up their own server systems and route around the scams that get people to write stuff that's worth $100 and get paid $10.
It always works that way throughout history with technology. What's difficult and mysterious in 2002 is commodotized in 2008.
I think Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and EC2 etc point in that direction. Scalable apps are quickly becoming commodities. The priesthood of developers who can make scalable apps is about to burst into flames.
I've been around this loop too many times to not recognize it.
I could just have easily made this piece about any one of a number of different people who have set up boundaries that I'm not supposed to cross. I don't have any upside in not talking about them, other than some anonymous cowards will post some comment spam here if I cross the lines. Big fucking deal, I say. :-)
Hope all is well with you and your new google.
dave
· 1 year ago
BTW, I think this is going to be the next blog post in the series. Thanks for the inspiration JF. :-)
Susan Geller Ettenheim
· 1 year ago
I spent quite a few years of my life running and developing femina.com. Today it does not look the way it did when it was at its peak, but my experience there makes me believe that Mahalo, while a sincere idea, isn't ever really going to be able to make it big. I loved and still do love femina.com - everything it stood for in those early days - every woman it connected but the reality is that it would never be possible to grow or meet the challenges of the quantity of great information online. It was a brilliant, original creation of Aliza Sherman and it was my joy to develop and run it, but as you say, it has to be ok to learn from the past and move on - without it being a personal issue.
Hanan Cohen
· 1 year ago
I did the obvious thing and Mahalo'd "Dave Winer".
At the bottom of the page there is a section titled "User Recommended Links for Dave Winer". One link there for a website of another person named "Dave". Not Winer.
Spam? Rudeness?
You decide.
dave
· 1 year ago
That's so funny!
I wonder what we're supposed to think about that.
One of the problems with Mahalo, it always seemed to me, was keeping all those pages fresh. Google deals with that pretty well, it seems, but human-edited content is another story. I'd love to hear from someone at Mahalo on that.
Thanks...
dave
· 1 year ago
I went and had a look and it's pretty clear that it's spam from a guy named Pinal Dave who wants a little flow and pagerank courtesy of their landing page for me.
By odd coincidence Dave's raising questions about paying fair rates for content, comes on the same day that Jon Pareles published a piece in the New York Times about the Rhythm-and-Blues Foundation. "Many rhythm-and-blues performers have little to show for their Top 10 hits, having signed away recording royalties and publishing rights at exploitative rates; it's something that still happens to young performers."
martin_english
· 1 year ago
Whats the word ? not Serendipity... - I came across "The trouble with Music" today ( see http://www.negativland.com/albini.html ) - similar issues, including the accounting methods that show how a band that sells 250k records can still end up broke.
I find the Search-mash Beta from Google and Google all I need ! The rest well well let's not confuse effort with results ! I When some one hit you personally you just hit the right button ! Keep It Up !
jason
· 11 months ago
its weird that mahalo is hawaiin and so is wikipedia's derivative, wikipedia comes from wikiwiki which is hawaiin for quick
All Comments
In terms of rehashing the event I simply think it was rude of you to yell at me in the middle of my presentation. If you had waited until the Q&A like a, well, normal person it would have been fine by me. That's just how people behave--it's common courtesy.
I love debate and you know that. We've debated 100's of times and I've never had a problem with that. No one is afraid of taking me on--that's a joke. People write blog posts all the time challenging what I say. So, let's not pretend this is some kind issue with me silencing people. People can attack me as often as they like. Screaming from the back row? Well, that's just rude as I've said. I've spoken at events for over a decade and only one person in that time has ever yelled at me: you.
I accepted your apology... move on dude! Life is short..
Best Jason
I've made some updates to your page to correct the error and include new content. Why don't you recommend some links as well? ;)
Take care,
Sean
I assume you're paid a salary and get benefits and stock options to do this work.
If so, when you ask me to suggest some links, you're basically asking me to work for free, right? So your stock can be worth more as well as the other shareholders of your company?
Now I do this for a lot of companies, I know when I'm doing it I'm being a chump, but if I love the product, I do it anyway. But...
Sorry, not only don't I love your product, even if I did, I doubt I'd help the company.
"I think Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and EC2 etc point in that direction."
Surely even more so are apps like Aestiva HTML/OS, and similar, which enable non-coders to create sophisticated interactive websites.
I must agree that the premise of Mahalo is not as laid out in its description.
I had pretty much let the web 2.0 thing pass me by but thought I needed to get involved or get left behind so started checking out the various startups to see what was going on.
The initial idea behind Mahalo sounds good but once I started reading exactly what it was I figured that it was essentially a selection of a groups favourite links on any given subject as long as that subject fell within the web's "top searches" and not a "web search" as the button indicates. You are searching a database rather than the live web and the results you get are arbitrarily decided in accordance with their guidelines.
Personally I would rather wade through a normal search engine to find the little gems and nuggets from small sites that may not have been around long than be spoon fed a list.
I'm aware you were vocal about your opinions on Mahalo and it's business model, but I don't remember that in the hall at Gnomedex. Jason obviously had an agenda with his presentation and that was to promote his new site. Heckling, in my opinion, is not cool. If you had a problem with the content, you should have taken it up with Chris afterwards and not tried to disrupt the presentation.
I didn't mean this as a personal attack, so hopefully you didn't take it this way. I just wanted to point out my observation of the happenings. It was my understanding from Jason's blog that the bad feelings on his part were from the heckling and not any other reviews/opinions you had about his site.
Second, you put in quotes and all caps things that I didn't say and you didn't accurately explain what happened there. Want to rehash it, okay, but lets get both sides equal time, and let's get some other witnesses in here, including people in the chat room, and on twitter, and other people who spoke out *before* I did. Let's get Jason's full transcript and his slides including his "Fuck Nick Denton" line, which he repeated. Rude? I think so and I thought so at the time. Let's get the other people who made comments from the audience during other presentations without waiting for the Q&A, and without waiting to be recognized.
You don't want to rehash it? Good, let's talk about software and UGC, and how we want to go forward with this stuff.
I think Mahalo is being challenged everyday and they work on their product value proposition to meet those challenges...if not then Jason will be just a promoter not an entrepreneur. If the product sucks it won't get traction. Jason seems to be working hard on the product. Being compared to wikipedia isn't a bad thing and I don't think Jason is running away from that. However being venture backed comparing yourselft to Google helps increase your valuation...
btw: i'm working on the next google too. :-)
Also, why invest so many millions of dollars to make a website with the top 10,000 search terms when you could do so much more for free with just 1000 people who volunteer to do 10 each?
I just dont understand why anyone would invest $20M. Why not just get 1000 people together to each write 10 articles. That might take all of a weekend or two to knock out.
Maybe we should at least give it a try, it could be easy to round people up if there was enough of a challenge.
One of the things that led me to this is the writer's strike in Hollywood. They're concerned that the big media companies are going to make a huge amount of money on the Internet and not give them any of it. I can see why they're concerned. So why not start their own companies, and make all the money and give none of it to the suits. Also the programmers, what are they doing that's so special that entitles them to huge chunks of equity? And why don't we, the users, get some of that equity? Hell, why don't we get *all* of it?
1. Filter our pages out.
2. Replace them with their own pages with their own ads on them.
Either we're leaving a lot of money on the table, or the investors got a bad deal.
It always works that way throughout history with technology. What's difficult and mysterious in 2002 is commodotized in 2008.
I think Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and EC2 etc point in that direction. Scalable apps are quickly becoming commodities. The priesthood of developers who can make scalable apps is about to burst into flames.
I've been around this loop too many times to not recognize it.
I could just have easily made this piece about any one of a number of different people who have set up boundaries that I'm not supposed to cross. I don't have any upside in not talking about them, other than some anonymous cowards will post some comment spam here if I cross the lines. Big fucking deal, I say. :-)
Hope all is well with you and your new google.
At the bottom of the page there is a section titled "User Recommended Links for Dave Winer". One link there for a website of another person named "Dave". Not Winer.
Spam? Rudeness?
You decide.
I wonder what we're supposed to think about that.
One of the problems with Mahalo, it always seemed to me, was keeping all those pages fresh. Google deals with that pretty well, it seems, but human-edited content is another story. I'd love to hear from someone at Mahalo on that.
Thanks...
http://www.mahalo.com/Dave_winer
It's not rude, in other words, but it does go a long way to undermine the case for Mahalo.
No doubt it'll get edited out now that we mentioned it here, though. So here's a screenshot.
http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom...
http://www.martin-english.com/whatsup/2008/01/m...
BTW, I'm not working on the next google :)