The most powerful feature of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit any page at any time. This feature has allowed everyone to get involved, even if their contribution is bad. The brilliance of this move is that the bad editors grow to be poor editors, and then poor editors then become average editors, and over some period of time some small percentage of the bad, poor, and average editors become great.

Over an extended period of time Wikipedia has grown to have 500 or so amazing editors. It took eight years, or 60 or so folks a year, but they did it. They converted one editor per week essentially.

Guy Kawasaki joked with me a decade ago that he was famous for doing nothing and for saying obvious things. Self deprecation is always attractive to me, and despite the fact that Guy really has never had a “hit,” he’s picked up some brilliant observations over his years as a self-described undeserving pundit. The most powerful of which is his famous quip: “don’t worry be crappy.”

Wikipedia is the perfect example of a site which doesn’t worry about being crappy, but rather its ability to evolve. They’ve let folks destroy their accuracy and reputation in the hopes that the increased interaction will be a net positive in the future… and it has. Of course, BLPs (bios of living persons) wind up suffering in that “crappy” state while the Wikipedia evolves, but that’s the price of a freewheeling system: some pain, but a lot of gain.

I’ve been very resistant to letting user run amok inside of Mahalo over the first twelve months we’ve been around. As a journalist and writer myself I’m kind of a fan of good grammar, spelling, and factually accurate information. Call me crazy, but when I see a mistake it makes me go a little crazy. Then again, I’m old now (37) and these new kids aren’t as hung up on the whole “fact checking” thing.

A a month or so ago I had a huge political figure by my office and I was showing him how Wikipedia works. I change his nationality from Irish-American to Greek-American and he was stunned that the vandalism stayed up there for so long (five days). Of course, I had to change it back… so it’s possible that it could have stayed there for a month or a year.

Now that Mahalo has 50,000 pages (5x what we set out to do in the first year), and 400 paid contributors (4x what we thought we would have in the first year), we’ve decided to let folks edit Mahalo pages (see image on right).

Now, it’s not going to be as freewheeling as Wikipedia day one. We’ve got three major differences:

1. You have to register and be logged in to edit a Guide Note. This is a major throttle on people contributing since the signup process takes a couple of minutes and an email address.
2. Our staff is going to check every edit made and confirm it is correct. We have three full-time folks on this right now and our expectation is we will only get 10-50 editors per day.
3. You can edit your own pages, or a page about your company. Our thinking is since we’re checking all the facts that’s an OK thing to do. (Wikipedia does not let you edit your own page).

If this goes well, then you can expect us to remove throttle number one. I’m interested to see where this goes.

Oh yeah, if you haven’t noticed we’ve updated 15,000 of our pages to have long Guide Notes that are super easy to scan. Think of them as mini-Wikipedia articles with just facts. They are 300 words compared to Wikipedia pages with 1,000 to 5,000 words.

Of the 50,000 pages in the system we’ve got 60-70% to this new standard. Over the next six weeks we should have 100% of our articles to the long guide note standard. This is the goal of the company: to help you navigate the web quickly and accurately. We’re a mashup of Wikipedia and Google: 50% content/facts and 50% curated links.

Fred Wilson’s partner Brad implored me to open up Mahalo when I pitched Union Square on the rough concept of what has become Mahalo. I told him no frackin’ way, but my thinking has evolved. My thinking today is that you can blend the paid, top-down editorial model with the unpaid, open model–time will tell if we’re right.

Chris Anderson of WIRED magazine spoke at Mahalo yesterday and he told me I needed to re-brand Mahalo from “human-powered search” to something else. Anyone have a suggestion as to a better way to described Mahalo.com’s 50-50 editorial/navigation service?

Note: You can watch user activity on Mahalo at our User Activity tracker. This is the same DashBoard our staff watches.

http://www.mahalo.com/Special:MahaloActivity

Another fun interview from down under… really great video quality.

Due to popular demand, here is the 2nd keynote presentation Jason made at CeBIT Australia in Sydney, aptly entitled Entrepreneurial Insanity: Why good is the enemy of the great

| View | Upload your own

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Keeping in line with all the recent great conference coverage… here’s a recap for those who were unable to make it to the DLD Conference in Munich this year.

Video
DLD interview with Jason Calacanis
DLD Day 2
TechCrunch – Mahalo vs. Wikia Search
Wales vs Calacanis
Marrissa Meyer Comments on Mahalo
Jeff Jarvis – DLD Wales vs. Calacanis
Ajax Girl – Video of Calacanis vs Wales

Text
Dave Winer – Out on the UGC Limb
Matt Deegan – Mahalo
The Long Tail – The Fat Tail, the Mid Tail, the Long Tail
Random Elements – Thoughts on Mahalo
Media Blog – The Fat Tail will be human
ReadWriteWeb – Humans Interrupting Algorithms
The Guardian – The Social Whirl Driving the Development of Search
DLD Conference – Humans Interrupting Algorithms
CNN – Old Media Meets Empowered Customers
Softpedia – Google hunts Mahalo

In the spirit of sharing the joy and excitement of great conferences past (like the recent visit to CeBIT Australia) – here is a nice selection of great press received from the most recent Le Web ‘03 in Paris. Can’t wait for next year!

Le Web coverage

Video
CenterNetworks – Mahalo Social Graph
DownloadSquad – Mahalo Takes Social Networking to the Extreme
Affiliate Tip – Jason Calacanis and Affiliate Spam

Text
Merc Extra – Mahalo takes a step forward
Search Engine Land
Mashable – Google answers
TechCrunch – Mahalo Goes Social
Guardian Blogs – Mahalo’s Human Powered Search
Webmetricsguru.com – Internet Pollution and How to Stop it
BBC.co.uk – Europe can ‘lead web technology’
Mahalo Social Demo in Flash
Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day: Mahalo
VentureBeat – Mahalo Delves into Social Search
Search Views: Search Engine Mahalo intros Social Features
IHT.com : Le Web 3.0
Onemanandhisblog.com : Jason Calacanis on Spam and Pollution
Blogforward.com : Mahalo Delves into Social Search
Newestonthenet.com : Mahalo launches Mahalo Social
Creative Commons – Mahalo Introduces CC Licensing
Zaidlearn – Mahalo Social and Follow
E-consultancy – Mahalo adds Social Features
Startupbeat – Mahalo Launces Social Service
Jan.flempo.com – Jason Calacanis as a great marketer
Webmetricsguru – Le Web 3.0_Pushes Traffic Up at Mahalo
Web2ireland.org – Le Web 3.0 now an unmissable event
Scobleizer – Google says Mahalo to Knol

So by popular demand, here is the presentation Jason made at CeBIT Sydney, aptly entitled Going Big.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Had a wonderful time in Sydney for CeBIT. Loved the city, loved the people, and loved the conference. I’m going to start collecting some of the press, video, and blog clippings here. If you covered the trip please post links in the comments.

At the event I did two talks: “Going Big” and “Entrepreneurial Insanity.” Both were well received, and I’m looking forward to doing a blog post on each complete with the slides and the video in the next week or so. Tyler is encoding the video, complete with some behind the scenes footage.

Every year I try to visit at least three countries outside the United States in order to learn about what’s going on in the space, meet people, and spread the word about Mahalo. These trips take five days each on average, but the 15-20 days I spend on them are well worth it.

In the past year we’ve traveled to Le Web 3 in Paris (video of my talk), DLD in Munich (video interview), CeBIT in Sydney, and NMK Fordum in London.

If you’re interested in having me speak at your conference please email Tyler at Mahalo.com and cc me jason at calacanis.com.

Here’s the first set of clippings.

Best Jason

CeBIT’s post talk interview

“Fire the good people!” – entrepreneurial wisdom from Jason Calacanis
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - May 20, 2008
When serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis took the stage at the CeBIT technology conference this week in Sydney, some audience members weren’t sure how to…

Aussie ICT needs rock stars and the EU
ZDNet.com.au, Australia - May 19, 2008
One method of crossing the valley of death is by having government research labs such as NICTA and DSTO create spin-offs, but Jason Calacanis…

The 2 Web Crew #26 – Jason Calacanis22 May 2008 by tech
… Golden-Years-Of-Hollywood-that-crazy-mofo-gun-nut-as-Ben-Hur-type proportions – Duncan Riley, Mick Liubinskas, Phil Morle, Stilgherrian, Bronwen Clune and Cameron Reilly talk to the one, the only, the legendary – JASON CALACANIS.

Jason Calacanis on Entrepeneurship cebit 0822 May 2008 by Ivan Kaye
JASON CALACANIS – Founder and CEO of Mahalo.com (Sequoia Capital Adviser Mahalo.com is a human powered search engine focused on search terms including travel, products, news , entertainment, sports, food and health. …
Venture Capital in Australia – http://bsivc.blogspot.com/

Interview with Mike Walsh.

Meeting Jason Calacanis20 May 2008 by Callum
I met Jason Calacanis at the blogger breakfast this morning. Duncan Riley was there, although I didn’t meet him. Somebody said he (Duncan) was a big wig, so I was checking him out online after the meeting. I came across Duncan talking …

Calacanis in Sydney19 May 2008 by admin
Our friend Jason Calacanis is down under, and manages to describe one of the world’s architectural wonders – the Sydney Opera House – as something out of the Planet of the Apes . . . And that’s why American’s are so welcomed everywhere …

Sydney Bloggers Breakfast with Jason Calacanis 28 May 2008 by JoshAnstey
As mentioned in my previous post, CeBIT Day 1, I met Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley at CeBIT and they invited me to their hotel for a bloggers breakfast. It was incredible to be invited to the breakfast.

Loic is a good friend of mine. He’s had me to Paris to speak at his wonderful events, I’ve had him stay at my place (and take video), and we spent some time over Thanksgiving together. I think the world of him, and love his family. He’s just a great guy.

That’s why it was so difficult for me, when we sat down to go over his startup, to give him my honest feedback on the pre-launch Seesmic. I hated the name, I hated the design, and I wasn’t big on the concept of a “video version of Twitter.” He smiled when I told him that and said I was right in some of my criticism but that there was more coming.

To be honest, I wasn’t so sure. It’s tough when you see someone you think is very smart doing something you think isn’t going to work.

Today I’m glad to say I was 100% wrong about Seesmic. I still hate the name, but I love where he has taken it. Video comments on blogs are brilliant.

On TechCrunch today I was reading a great post by Mike Arrington about the importance of competition in the search space given Google’s inevitable climb to 90% marketshare. In the comments was a video post from Tim O’Reilly with replies from Mike Arrington. Two of heavy hitters taking time out of their day to chime in with raw video responses–empowered by Seesmic.

There is a huge lesson here for entrepreneurs: it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish.

Three examples from my life:

1. Silicon Alley Reporter started as a $90 a month newsletter, but I shifted it to a glossy magazine with trade shows and an email newsletter. The original newsletter concept would have become a $500k a year business, the business Gordon, Xeni, Karol, Joanne, Keith and Brian and I built become a large business with $11.6M in revenue in the biggest year. Thank God we switched models.
2. Weblogs, Inc. was building an about.com style model with subdomains (i.e. wireless.weblogsinc.com, gadget.weblogsinc.com, etc). We switched it to a branded model with Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq and thank God we did.
3. Mahalo started as human-powered, top down search a year ago with 95% links and 5% content. Now it’s 50% content and 50% links… and the content part is still growing. We might end up 90% content and 10% links at this pace.

Bottom line? As an entrepreneur you have to follow your nose and don’t worry if you dump or change your original model. Evolution is the revolution.

However, it you don’t start you can’t iterate. Loic started and he’s evolved the model. I still hate the name, I still hate the destination website with back and forth 15 second videos from people in creepy lighting… but love the comment product. If I was Loic I would put 110% of my effort into the comments product. It’s a huge winner.

A friend of mine recently told me that smart people have a million dollar idea every week or two, but there are many smart people who are not millionaires. Why? They don’t start.

Just start…. it’s all about starting. Then, of course, it’s about finish. And starting, as hard as it is, is easy when compared with finishing. I’ll save that for another post.

If you, or someone you know, is considering early acceptance to the DEMO 2008 conference please contact me ASAP at jason at Mahalo.com (or 310-456-4900) so Michael Arrington and I can review you for fast tracking at TechCrunch50.

• DEMO costs $18,500 and will have 1/5th the audience and 1/10th the coverage of TechCrunch50.

• TechCrunch50 has a $50,000 grand prize, is free, and is brought to you by not only TechCrunch, but also Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Sequoia Capital, Mayfield, Charles River, Fenwick and West, and Clearstone. Also, we’ve got the most influential judges in the tech world including Roelof Botha (Sequoia), Marissa Mayer (Google), and Marc Andreessen(Netscape, NING, Angels investor, Genius). When you see the next 20 judges you’ll be blown away… we’re just getting started!!!

If you’re a startup company launching something important you need to do it at TechCrunch. Don’t be pressured by DEMO to pay $18,500 for six minutes, and don’t be pressured by them to make an early decision. Mike Arrington and I will take 30 minutes with you in the next week to talk on the phone, or meet in person, and give you an instant decision if you’ve been “selected” by DEMO (and “selected” they mean, charged $3,000 a minute!).

If you know someone considering DEMO 2008 it is your moral obligation to get them in touch with Mike and I because friends don’t let friends waste $20,000 presenting for six minutes!!!

Friends: If you can twitter this blog post and send it to your VC/startup friends I would appreciate it. Some folks might make a huge mistake and signup for DEMO 2008 in the coming week. Last year DEMO getting kicked out (without a refund) folks who presented at TechCrunch50 (really, it’s true).

My email and mobile phone are open: jason at mahalo.com and 310-456-4900.

best regards,

Jason

Note: if you’re not comfortable with my aggressive pitching of TechCrunch50 conference over DEMO 2008 please understand that it is based on my belief that DEMO–and other conferences that are based on startup payola–are EVIL and should be eliminated from our ecosystem. It is UNFAIR to take advantage of startup companies and make them pay almost $20k for six minutes on stage. DEMO has been spreading this “pay for your time on stage” virus in our industry for way too long. We need to stand up and fight against it as entrepreneurs–it’s unfair on every level. If DEMO does the right thing and drops their startup payola/ransom I will be the first person to tell you to go do it.

Last year I asked @Ev to let me pay him $20 a month/$250 a year for a Twitter Pro account which was on its own uber-redundant server cluster. Evan’s response was it wasn’t a cost issue but a software issue.

However, I still think there is a huge market–perhaps 1-5% of the twitter base–that would pay for a professional account. If 1% of 10m users would pay this fee you are looking at 100k paid users. At $250 a year each that is $25m a year in revenue.

That’s a lot of servers and developers.

@ev @jack: I’d think about.