I baked Calcanis a cookie, but I eated it. :(

someone else took that shot a long time ago (you can tell because my face is think--not round)... I haven't been that sad/malnourished for years.

750,000 page views in first 24 hours, tons of helpful feedback, and the SEO's HATE IT--couldn't have been a more successful *ALPHA* launch as far as I'm concerned.

I mean... except if Nick Denton would rip it apart. As we all know, Denton was sure Weblogs Inc would fail-- and that worked out just fine. My big concern is that Denton is actually going to like Mahalo... that would be the kiss of death--no more coverage on Valleywag!

Mahalo for the feedback little Nicky,

Jdawg

Denton, the transparency of your desperation is amazing. Stumble does not create "digg effects"- traffic comes much more gradually and continues for much longer periods of time.
The startup has been live in beta for 48 hours and you are are saying it's not going so well? I promise you it is going to be more sticky than Truemors.

I do wish Jason luck, but I'm still trying to find how in the grand scheme of things Mahalo is any different than the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org).

Oh, I suspect Jason Calacanis would be shamelessly promoting something related to himself if his site hadn't launched :) I see this as no different than all of his other attention driving campaigns.

I think it's fair to say it'll take some time for his site to develop. If in a year it has nothing going on, people can be more critical. Though I kind of thought this article was funny because of the photo, too.

No offense to Jason or his investors.

Doug: we are in month five of a five year project.

We've got a lot of learning, testing, and listening to do. We've learned more in the last 48 hours then in the last five months building this.

Mahalo for the feedback and keep checking the site.

In fact, check out the "daily serp" to watch what we're doing.

Mahalo,

Jason

We live in an over-communicated society. Creating your own momentum by suggesting your own wares can no longer be seen as purely self-serving.

They are proof-points that you believe in yourself and what you are doing. Rising above the noise requires an all-hands-on-deck effort. Including your own.

Derrick

Can we just kill the term "serp" now, please?

i believe that might be the photo from his profile on the emo club site (most cure fans, some morrissey before the 90's too)...

as for mahalo - hey! mahalo for giving us all something to rip to shit!

Ok -- as one of the Open Directory Project Founders, I can't resist the layup...

5 months is a lot of time.

In month 5 of the Open Directory Project (started in June of '98) we had over 5,000 editors and over 100k sites in the directory...*and* we had already sold the company to Netscape.

Now, we ended up taking what became almosty exactly $16M in cash and stock, so maybe it's not such a bad comparison, given Mahalo's funding :-)

http://web.archive.org/web/19981212031345/http://www.newho...

Still....better get cracking there, Mr. Calacanis :-)

Mahalo indeed.

Does anyone find it perfectly awesome that "Jason Calacanis" is the fourth most searched item at Mahalo.com?

"Mahalo PR" is the third most searched item.

http://www.mahalo.com/Mahalo_FAQ

I'm interested in the project despite its detractors and similarity to countless other human edited search projects. Yet, the name Mahalo is absolutely ridiculous. It was a bad choice. Sorry, but really horrible.

Tolles: We will do our best to live up to DMOZ's amazing legacy. Clearly the open model leads to more information in the short term, but lower standards and more gaming in the long term. It really is an interesting question as to which model works best.

My guess balance is the key issue.

Mahalo for all the great feedback everyone!

Jason

ENOUGH with the mahalo... geez. I am about to send you a large can of mahalo.

Jason,

It's already partially being done on the front page, but displaying the top searches for a category on the category's page along with the top 20 searches for the entire site would be a nice addition.

You couldn't have just bought humansearch.com? If you're able to fun 5 years without revenue, why not at least buy a domain that gives you a *fighting* chance of getting to that point?

Narnio: descriptive names like humansearch.com, pets.com, etc. are horrible for branding. They are good for spam sites or AdSense traps however.

The irony of this post is almost more than I can take.

You realize that most of what Nick Douglas diggs is his own stories, right?

@JasonCalacanis: Hey, Jason -- I did slam Weblogs Inc's initial model: b2b niche titles with limited appeal, and no branding. Sites like http://gridcomputing.weblogsinc.com, which did indeed never take off. Unfortunately, you evolved rapidly, and launched sexier properties, more on the Gawker model, like Engadget and Joystiq. Which is why it's way too early to write off Mahalo. You're flexible, and I presume the site will look very different in a year's time.

Oh, the post on Weblog Inc's first take, back in September 2003, is here:
http://www.nickdenton.org/archives/009038.html

I was wrong about one thing: Movable Type didn't get better. And Calacanis was right to build his own publishing system.

@JasonCalacanis: anything but mahalo... its just too rife for puns, and pretty forgettable after that.

Ha! I was waiting for this one.

Taking a bit of a stretch to make this StumbleUpon thing even worth a jab. Jason uses this same technique with delicious and even twitter. None of it is about driving tons of traffic from these sites or creating a "digg effect". Instead he is creating his own online networks of bloggers and techheads that will go on to post and talk about what he posts. This is where the heavy, qualified, and long term traffic will come from. Not a bad use of these social apps which Jason has actively built the last few months to 1000's of follows. And Nick Douglas does the same thing. Hell so do I, because its overall effective.

There is a better valleywag story about the history of the mahalo domain, go fetch.

Seanpercival: I think you nailed it. Social applications like digg, delicious, twitter, and stumbleupon are great ways to connect with your core peoples: friends, family, enemies, frenemies (like NickD, Littly Nicky, and me), clients, employees, future employees, investors, future investors, clients, future clients, haters, etc.

I don't bookmark my stuff for traffic... I use social tools to keep people up to date on the things I'm trying to figure out. Like how to get Mahalo's page loads from 1.5 seconds to < 1 second without giving up our sexy design (done by Jon Hicks--greatest designer in the world). I got dozens of comments on how to speed up the site and that alone makes participation in twitter, stumbleupon, delicious, and even--gulp--ValleyWag, worth it.

In fact, people reading this might even consider checking out the suggested link functions over at Mahalo and tell me how to make them better. Twitter, iPhone, and Apple all have a bunch of suggested links. I want to really jump start this process. Thoughts?

[ Also, how many comments do you think we can get this thread up to? 100? 200? ]

@seanpercival: "There is a better valleywag story about the history of the mahalo domain, go fetch." Oh, come on, don't tease like that. Here's the deal: I'll tell you what I heard about Jason's domain name binge; and you tell me. I heard that -- wise about the importance of names after the experience with Weblogs Inc and flush with VC cash -- JC spent up to $500k on names. Word is he spent $30k on aday.com -- ipod.aday.com, etc. -- before deciding that AOL might think he was trying to build another network of blog sites to compete with that he had just sold. 20.com was even more expensive, but then JC moved on to the Hawaiian names. Mahalo in advance for your tips, Sean!

@Nick Denton:

I think the story Sean was hinting at is that mahalo.com was used as a celebrity porn link dump years ago.

^^ Ya you got it, not really a great story because its not like you can control what a recycled name was used before.

As far as what Jason spend on names I'm sure only he and a few close friends know all the details. He did post about having some trouble acquiring the mahalo.com domain. Maybe he'll tell us the story about this. Did you use an escrow service? Did the owner know who was trying to make the purchase?

My guess is that domain cost somewhere in the range of 10-20 large.