Comments on: Kara Interviews Jason Calacanis

By: Mahalo: The Entire D5 Demo With Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher | BoomTown | Kara Swisher | AllThingsD

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:56:42 +0000

[...] visited the Santa Monica, Ca.-based company recently and you can see the two posts from the visit here and here, as well as seeing the videos of a Calacanis interview and tour of Mahalo below, along [...]

By: Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:44:55 +0000

Which is why Jason’s struggle is so poignant!

Seriously, I forgot to compare it to Yahoo, where I once spent days with those “surfers,” who are now lost to Web history.

But I can say I once saw the equivalent of Internet unicorns.

Thanks for the great analysis.

By: StanleyWong.org

StanleyWong.org — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:40:43 +0000

[...] just watched an interview by Kara Swisher, Boomtown, of Jason Calanias of Mahalo on the All Things D [...]

By: Stanley Wong

Stanley Wong — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:34:18 +0000

For the life of me I still don’t see how Mahalo will scale. Yahoo!’s original directory started off with a team of Surfers (editors) who created and organized and ontology. Yahoo! ended up decommissioning the directory because it didn’t scale. Yahoo! was overwhelmed by the number of submissions.

Fast forward to what eventually became Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ) which eventually amassed over 70,000 editors. The current DMOZ is rife with SPAM, dead links, neglect, and accusations of graft.

Other things such as Social Bookmarking (i.e. Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc) have shown problems as well due to the lack of depth.

Mahalo, to me, is more like Answers.com than a competitor to Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft’s search engines.

The bottom line is the Internet, growing at an exponential rate, just can’t scale with linear approaches to organize the information. One must employ algorithmic techniques that can scale with the growth of information on the web and understand concepts from a fundamental relationship level.