icecrums

With all the crap Jason Calacanis get in the blog sphere for being an idiot, he is actually into something with Mahalo. Growth is really starting to pick up at a steady rate (almost at an unbelievable rate). I am not declaring Mahalo a winner yet, but it’s sure proven a point.

My big problem with Mahalo is that it is basically human moderated(edited) by 20 guys that work in Mahalo. Yes, it’s user feed them with links but the final cut(as I understand it) is still up to the moderators. The claim they are spam free (which is probably true thanks to the moderators):

We take the time to find and organize the best links for search terms, so you don’t have to. With traditional search engines you need to figure out the right search term and find relevant results within an unorganized list that often contains irrelevant results, spam, and some mediocre sites. With Mahalo, you can enter a simple search term and instantly get an organized page of results that only includes great links.
Our results contain everything you need to know about a topic and are organized into sections to help you quickly find what you need. For example, our travel pages for cities contain sections on basics (weather, current events, maps, history), flights, vacation packages, transportation, activities, attractions, events, tours, hotels, restaurants, shopping, nightlife, and local blogs.

I believe in the algorithm and most recently crowd sourcing. Mahalo can he considered the latter, even though it’s being heavily moderated. I don’t see myself using Mahalo before resorting to Google since the information will most likely be incomplete.

The weakest link is ultimately the moderators, since it’s hard for them to scale with a consistent quality (unlike the algorithm) over all the different fields of information. A moderator might be good at iding a good recipe or Paris Hilton site, but can they get more technical. The true question for Mahalo is: Now that they’ve got humans crawling the web rather than a server, are hamster powered servers next.

I guess where Mahalo falls short is where Google’s Knol might actually work. Mahalo seems to be geared most towards the not so tech savvy users, which is pretty much most people out there. There is room in this space, as proven by About.com with 38 million unique monthly visitors.

(Via Silicon Alley Insider.)

For those TechCrunch and Web 2.0 fans out there that like trying out every service they see can now do it without the spam. From the creators of the Pirate Bay comes Slopsbox.com. Here is how it works:

1. While at any site, register with an email like this: anything@slopsbox.com (and i mean anything)
2. Go to Slopsbox and enter the email and do a captcha
3. Enjoy the site

You can also point any domain to their mx records and use something other than slopsbox.com

Everything is erased after 24 hours. Pretty neat. I’ve already bookmarked it to my bar and will use it a lot. The cool thing is that I can now ditch those junk mail email I have for that type of stuff. No passwords to remember and always on the go.

(Via Mashable!.)

As a Mac user for a couple of years now, my eyes have been trained to pick up small GUI details. Every time I sit in front of an Ubuntu machine I can’t help notice that it’s still rough around the edges (visually that is). I found this image of a proposed make over through digg. I am starting to see some of the cool rounded edges new to Leopard and gradients. I just love some of the cool gradients that are popping up everywhere in Leopard. The images below have the rounded edges and gradient similarities in both (leopard, Ubuntu).

(Via Digg.)

I just realized I wasted my first 2008 post on something really silly. Hopefully this will be another great year in technology. I can see it being a great year for alternative energy startups, established web 2.0 companies to grow and the wisdom of the crowd to become wiser!

Nothing too specific there…lol. I will come up with something better for my 2008 predictions.

Till then, may Web 2.0 (and Mac) force be with you!

Nice list of everyday useful apps. I agree with most of them. The one that made me post this is the fact that he is dropping NetNewsWire for Google Reader:

His 2007 Post on his RSS reader:

I’ve used NewsGator’s NetNewsWire desktop feed reader from the moment I switched to a Mac in early 2006. It’s not free, but having fast and offline access to feeds was worth the $30 I paid for it. Bloglines dropped off the list because of NetNewsWire, although I expect to be moving over to Google Reader in the near future. Offline access is less important now that I have EVDO cellular access, and Google Reader made significant improvements to its product in its September upgrade.

His 2008 Post on the same:

Two years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Last year I switched to NetNewsWire. But Google Reader is just too good to ignore any longer. It’s quite simply the most elegant and useful feed reader available today. The product actually first launched in October 2005 but had serious flaws. But it got steadily better over time. Recent privacy hiccups aside, Google Reader is a beautiful web application and an amazing way to digest tons of information effectively.

Right now I am running NNW 3.1b38 which has received a really cool interface overhaul and improved stability. When it comes to RSS I can be very picky. Although Google Reader has improved substantially over the last year, it will never be as convenient as a desktop app (even with google gears for offline reading).

NNW is more than an RSS reader since it has a built in browser, thus making it a true “news reading environment” (NRE….just made it up).

I think web apps are cool for sharing with people, but still lack desktop sharing. For instance, NNW has a “Post to Weblog” button that allows me to send a link of an article straight to MarsEdit which is an incentive to make blogging easier. Another one is the archiving feature which allows you to build a searchable wiki for future references.

Hopefully web apps will become more desktopy and play better with other apps to make it a more Mac like experience (i.e. where everything just works).

(Via TechCrunch.)