Lemonade Monday: Mahalo as a platform; What should Mahalo's API include and what should our license be?

Let's start Monday off by squeezing some juice from the weekend's lemons and adding some simple sugar shall we? The "former friend" had two points that are valid (both came after the berating... but I digress :-):

a) how, if at all, can we make Mahalo into a plaform the people can play with?
b) how can we enable people to profit from that platform?*

* [ Note: With regard to making money, we already have 800+ folks working in the Mahalo Greenhouse getting paid thousands of dollars a month in aggregate. This is the same model I used at Weblogs, Inc. We have a very revolutionary model for people getting paid.... we pay them for work. ]

Mahalo's API
Our API is in the works and I'd like to give folks the chance to contribute to it. From my perspective the ability to pull the following from our database in order to play is a nice starting point:

The Mahalo Top Seven: our editorial device in which we narrow down the best seven links on the web for a particular search. A lot of work and deliberation goes into this list and as such it is a very, very clean list.
Guide Note: Our Guide Notes are concise explanations of a search term. Clearly pulling these short descriptors could help some applications... right?
Disambiguation Tree: Our disambiguation lessons (i.e. do you mean Rome the TV show or Rome the city?) might be able to help other projects. Of course, we don't have this is structured format really.
Fast Facts: Quick Facts about search.
Related Searches: A guides' view on related terms for a keyword.
New Pages
Categories
Recent Changes
Banned Links (by search term)
Approved Links (by search term)

Any thoughts on how to leverage our dataset for the old "win-win?"
Mahalo's License
Right now we are reserving all rights, but I think a creative commons, non-commercial, attribution license might be acceptable with regard to our business. Of course, I'm concerned about how attribution occurs and what is defined as commercial and non-commercial. Is a non-commercial site by a commercial company non-commercial? Is a non-commercial site that drives traffic to a commercial site really non-commercial? As a content holder I've always take the "ask us" approach and I'm a little concerned about unlocking the doors to the kingdom. In terms of commercial activity I'm open to any discussion with anyone about it at any time.

Advice and thoughts on a license? Pros and cons? Ways to manage them?

[ Very cute photo CC by e.t. ]

Aug 13th 2007 2:02AM
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1. Sorry to go slightly off topic (but you sort of mentioned it) but why can't you pay directly International Greenhouse members? Other companies do it and surely you could use PayPal to do it.

JMTC
Molly

Posted at 3:15AM on Aug 13th 2007 by Phillip Molly Malone

2. Creative Commons is licensing-by-numbers for dopes.

Why would I want to use Creative Commons to automate away the initial contact with the people who are doing the most interesting stuff with my stuff? Aren't these the exact people with whom I'm trying to start a "conversation"?

In your case: "We welcome creative and inspired uses for Mahalo content. Send us an email and we'll work something out. Other use (including non-commercial use) is governed by our existing terms of service."

Posted at 4:34AM on Aug 13th 2007 by meanguy

3. Hi Jason

I don't think you should be trying to think of how you can turn yourselves into a platform just because someone rightly points out (and you agree, if I remember right) that you're not. So what? Mahalo is what it is, it has vision and a mission, and turning away from that by trying to make yourself into something more generic and less focussed feels like a bad move to me. I feel similarly about your having an API. Are people clamoring for it? If so, then put what they're asking for into an API. But if not, don't go on a fishing expedition trying to whip up an API just in order to be able to tick the "Got an API" box as well as the "We are a platform" box. I don't think those directions are where the strength of Mahalo lies, and so heading in those directions weakens you - makes you look more vague, diverts attention and resources, etc. So you're not a platform and may not need an API - congratulations, and more strength to you. Focus, etc. I'm sure you know all this. Anyway....

Regards.

Posted at 6:27AM on Aug 13th 2007 by Terry Jones

4. Talks about everyone getting rich of Mahalo distract for the concept but yes it's a business after all.

I'll throw out the following:

1. Greenhouse - Lots of people (myself included) are already making money here. While its not a full time salary its does offer a more than fair return on time spent. Compare this to what others try to make with programs like adsense and affiliate programs. Most never make anything significant and in the process pollute the web. This applies to independents (the little guy/girl) and not so much high traffic people/websites.

2. Embeddable Mahalo Search - Google offers a search bar as part of the Adsense program. If a visitor searches and clicks on a sponsored link they get a share of the click payout. This would be something to offer when Mahalo actually has advertisements on it. Or be very generous and pay for anytime the search box is used.

3. API - Yes all of the above, adding only the Top 50 list. Hard to say exactly what to do with this but I imagine smart people will figure it out. You also need a larger data set for this and most things to be really effective. Also let us see the data google doesnt, search patterns and beyond.

4. Get Wiki - Why did Wiki get so big? Why did so many find it and start contributing? The software and idea was innovate but what brought it to the top of Google pages was classic Google bombing. When writing a blog post, and using a word you want to backup with more info people needed a goto resource to link. Most of the times the Wiki page was already created even if the topic was obscure. With more content and hopefully more incoming links, Mahalo will also rise to the top. I'd like to see the two side by side in Google results because I can hit Wiki for info overload, or if I want a list of blogs/news/photos/videos I can hit Mahalo. Drive the SEO's crazy and make a Snap.com like plugin for websites to create Mahalo links on the fly.

Sorry thats a lot, making up for lost commenting on this blog I suppose. :P

Enjoy

Posted at 8:29AM on Aug 13th 2007 by sean percival

5. You dont have a platform, and you dont need to open up your non-API to anyone. the service you provide is not some sophisticated software architecture that can benefit from being open, so more developers can access it. your not in that business... youre in the journaism business taking popoular or interesting stuff and writing about it, then making it easy to find. thats great, but it isnt a platform, and it certainly doesnt ned an open API to succeed.

Your company isnt in the same business as others out there, so there is no need to check the web 2.0 box for every nauseating feature everyone else has...

This guy didnt like the way you self promote. plain and simple. He thought your virtous "clean up internet polution, search engine spam" routine was incongruous with your self promoting nature. He'll get over it, or not, but I dont think there was anything to learn from the conversation other than that some people dont like you, and others do. time to move on.

: )

Posted at 8:47AM on Aug 13th 2007 by jeff dachis

6. How does a Mahalo with an open API not become Squidoo?

Posted at 9:08AM on Aug 13th 2007 by Erik Schwartz

7. Don't listen to Winer and focus on your core product. Ask yourself this-- who is making money from APIs? Mainly, it's people selling products like Amazon. You're not selling a product, you're creating a service. Put all your energies into that service, its core functionality.

A way to access your data for outsiders, at this point, is not going to get you where you need to be. Use your engineers' resources to improve your basic offering. Simple syndication tools are enough right now.

In the future, you can be a Glam.com of top links, allowing others to use your data as long as they include your ad code as well.

For now, forget Winer. What has he ever done, business-wise? He should be on top of the blog world, but he's not because his vision is highly limited and his personality sucks. If you believe in Mahalo, focus on what it does best.

Posted at 12:52PM on Aug 13th 2007 by Alex

8. Regarding #1, I'm pretty sure nobody knows better than Jason the value of retribution for content creators. That's why I find strange, to say the least, that Mahalo still hasn't worked out some way for paying foreign Greenhouse contributors for their SeRPs. Both Amazon.com and Google have been sending checks overseas for a long time, so it would be nice to see that Mahalo takes care of that.

Posted at 1:35PM on Aug 13th 2007 by Ricardo Tohmé

9. I am building a kind of search site. Part own search, part come from open source lucene.NET. It will be very nice to use your human edit search result.

Tell me how to your API?

Posted at 1:59PM on Aug 13th 2007 by guoqi

10. Mahalo's value is in the content. Its taking the Yahoo! Directory to a whole different level. It solves the one main hinderance of a human powered directory - by opening it up into a community, rather than editing inhouse.

You're tackling a problem of SEO spam by creating a resource that's more difficult to spam. That in itself is commendable. I noticed in your recent podcast with SEOers, they love Squidoo but hate Mahalo. Squidoo is a spam haven, Mahalo isn't. Not difficult to spot the trend. SEOers will hate Mahalo until they figure out how to game it for their own benefit.

Does Mahalo need to be a platform? If you take a look from further away, the platform is already there - a wiki. So you have to register/login to do anything - same with Facebook. Facebook, to me, is just one "squeeze" page where the only interactive bit is to register.

I'll draw another parallel. Two years at Gnomedex Dave Winer did a presentation about the OPML Editor - that wasn't a platform (the Flickr, newsriver, twitter addons are really using the Frontier code underneath). The real platform was Frontier, which was running underneath the Editor. You did a presentation that included Mahalo - that wasn't a real platform, but the wiki underneath is.

High quality content has value - that's where Mahalo is scoring. Maybe open up RSS feeds on current topics - like the Karl Rove resigning page, and whenever a new news article / link gets added to the Mahalo page, make it an entry on its RSS feed, like a link blog. That's going to offer high quality and timely coverage of current events.

Also, since Mahalo is essentially a list of high quality links about subjects, it makes a great "Related stories" modules/widgets for other people's website, particularly tech blogs, news blogs and politics blogs. Hopefully Mahalo's coverage is impartial and remains that way.

An Open Search API is probably a must - not sure if Mahalo's already got that. That just opens it to be immediately searchable through the browser search box in the top right corner.

Posted at 3:50PM on Aug 13th 2007 by Isofarro

11. API suggestion - make it as Web-friendly as possible. Check How to Publish Linked Data on the Web, have a look at the kind of things that are being done around LinkingOpenData.

Posted at 4:57AM on Aug 14th 2007 by Danny

12. Sorry, missed the note re. links - here they are:
How to Publish Linked Data on the Web
http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/
LinkingOpenData
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData

Posted at 5:00AM on Aug 14th 2007 by Danny

13. Mahalo's missing a win-win for content producers, not so much general users.

I've elaborated in a late night insomnia blog post ;)

http://www.alexrudloff.com/2007/08/16/mahalo-feedback/

Posted at 1:38AM on Aug 16th 2007 by Alex Rudloff

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