Mike Butcher

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I interviewed Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com while he was in London for the NMK Forum this week.

Broadly speaking, he covered what Mahalo will set out to achieve and how. Mahalo is to be a human powered search engine, creating better results and easier to use information than the brute force of a cold algorithm. As Calacanis said to me after the interview, “Google plus human trumps Google alone”. The human power is to be supplied by 40 “guides” sifting information, which will grow to 100 by the end of the year.

However, as I ask him, what happens if someone, who is not getting a good search result for their company out of Mahalo, decides to switch some of their SEO budget into bribing a Mahalo guide? His answer shows that Mahalo is perhaps a better thought out project than some critics have suggested…

Later on we discuss the entrepreneurial scene in Europe and the US right now.

BREAKING NEWS: The Internet is getting polluted, said Jason Calacanis today in his keynote speech today at NMK Forum 07. He calls it an 'environmental crisis' of bad blogging, gaming the system, SEO gone mad and "pay per post".

"The polluting SEO slime balls have destroyed our Internet and it's time to take it back" he said.

He introduced Mahalo.com to the UK internet industry, which is a new human powered search engine to filter the rubbish in search results into a comprehensible form.

He went on to make a new announcement about "Mahalo Greenhouse" – where anyone can help build the world's first search engines and users will get paid to do this.

If a user is accepted they get to start building age on, for instance, a history of the Martini.

Mahalos explains the concept more fully here:

"Today I'm thrilled to announce the Mahalo Greenhouse, a place where the public can build search results that-if accepted by our Guides-will be included in the Mahalo search index. Oh yeah, if we accept your search result we will pay you $10 to $15 per search result (the range is based on how many search results you've completed: more here). Now, if you're a disciple of Yochai and you absolutely will not work on a web-based project for money, we've got an amazing proposition for you: make the web better by writing spam-free search results and we'll donate your fees to the Wikimedia Foundation. So, you can make the world better 2x: first by making clean, spam- free search results and second by helping keep the Wikipedia running (those server bills ain't cheap!). We've earmarked up to $250,000 in donations to the Wikipedia this year."

The world's biggest yellow pages publisher, Yell, has threatened to shut down Yellowikis, the wiki-based yellow pages directory, accusing it of of "misrepresentation", "passing off" and suggests that using the name Yellowikis could "constitute an 'instrument of fraud'. It's contacted Yellowikis co-founders Paul Youlten and Rosa Blaus (his 15 year-old daughter) demanding they shutter the website, transfer the domain names to Yell and agree to pay damages to Yell for loss of profits. Yell made $2.4bn in 2005. Yellowikis had a loss of $500 last year. Youlten is contesting the action, and, somewhat reasonably, argues that people find small businesses via Google these days, not Yell. Perhaps Yell should sort out it's search engine marketing, rather than picking on tiny Internet starups. Yellowikis has reportedly been growing at 8.7% month-on-month and has 494 editors and about 5,000 articles listed – Yell, by contrast has classifieds running into the hundreds of thousands, if not more. Yet when was the last time you saw a search result with Yell in the URL? Perhaps that deal with Google Maps in April last year wasn't so great after-all…

Technorati Tags: Mediabites

Jon Snow, presenter, Channel 4 News spoke at The Media Guardian's Changing Media Summit.

He had a lot to say:

He doesn't see any problem with new media I just see and "erosion of crap." In the end the webmaster is a key figure of any organisation. Utter gold dust can come flying your way.

"Old media used to be so one-way and irresponsible. Now we have a way of introducing material that we would never have had before,."

He mentioned an SAS men who could be brought into a show because they'd emailed in, whereas before it would have taken "endless lunches."

3G mobile phones with video are great.

Doctor Ali Fadil – a GP in Faluja who gave Chanel 4 news video into the barbarity of US troops.

Snow gets 20 direct communications a day at least. He has no worries other than time management.

We're into a new world and the only issue is how we manage it.

I can't see the secret society surviving. We're entering an unprecedented period of anarchy and it's fantastic.

The media's problem is merely to know how to use this stuff.

Transparency is an issue. There should no longer be a one-way street in media activity.

Blogging, vlogging etc is often considered an extension of the day-job in media firms, but there is a danger of "stopping being a journalist and just becoming a transmitter."

You can't con all of the people all of the time, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Libel is a strong consideration. The lawyer has grown in stature beyond recognition. And is now a massive presence in our newsroom. Libel is a huge aspect and we have an repressive system. All the web has down is power the existing system.

Snowmail has to go through lawyer now.

There was a weekend when Amazon outed book reviewers by mistake and the same applies to Comment is Free – they know who comments.

The mbites.com podcast this week looked at how digital music is impacting both on music fans and the artists themselves. The guests (pictured) were Laura Lee Davies, former editor of Time Out magazine in London and a music journalist of 20 years experience, and Ben Drury, founder and managing director of 7digital.com, which provides digital downloading services to many leading brands and artists’ web sites.

Download the MP3 file here (approx 18MB, 20 minutes long) or subscribe to the podcast feed and download it automatically into your favourite podcasting software and/or mobile media player device (ok, iPod then), or even subscribe direct from iTunes.

This is the third in a series of regular mbites podcasts, hosted at London private members club, Adam Street.

If you’d like to be a guest on the next Bitecast, where we’ll be documenting some of the most interesting new developments in digital and mobile media, contact Mike Butcher.