Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. centered around any given subject. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about.

Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service directly – rather then depend on on-site advertising – by persuading brands to pay for management of their respective lenses.

In a blog post, Godin shares more details about the new initiative – dubbed ‘Brands in Public’ – and explains why he believes brands will be willing to pay for it.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.

That all sounds super duper, and I have the highest respect for the man, but I also have mixed feelings about the way Squidoo is going about it.

Rather than convincing companies to set up their own public profile pages for their brands to aggregate and manage online conversations, Squidoo is creating hundreds of unofficial ones (e.g. for Guinness) in the hopes that companies will come to them and cough up $400 per month for the right to develop the page on their terms. Once a company pays up and gains control over the relevant Squidoo lens, the left hand column will ‘belong’ to them.

This will enable companies to post responses, highlight third-party blog posts, run contests and quizzes, and more. Basically, it becomes a place where companies can both lead, monitor and respond to the online conversations about their brands, which Godin says is particularly helpful when shit storms brew on the Web (whether deserved or not).

I’m not sure I like the fact that Squidoo takes the lead in creating pages for brands only to ‘unlock’ them for a monthly fee afterwards. Sure, there’s some truth to its claim that conversations are happening around the web anyway and they’re merely aggregating them, but I’m sure many will claim that the company is doing this for obvious SEO reasons. Get Satisfaction follows a similar strategy of holding company profile pages ‘hostage’, and has in the past been criticized for that behavior.

I also think a $400/month price point is extremely high for something that can easily be built internally. Squidoo seems to realize this and offers the first 100 brands to sign up a share of the $500,000 in-house ads that the company will run across the site promoting the service and the first partnering brands.

Either way, Squidoo already signed up a number of beta-testers (e.g. Home Depot) and hopes to attract more brands in the near future. The company published an e-book (PDF) about why any company should be considering this, and in it shared some numbers about the Squidoo network size.

Founded 3 years ago (Michael Arrington thought it could become Godin’s ‘purple albatross’ at the time), Squidoo claims it has attracted 400,000 users who hand-built over 1 million pages to date. Squidoo also says it has raised a ’significant’ yet undisclosed amount of capital for charity and is one of the 500 most-trafficked sites on the Web. Looking at the Compete chart below, they do seem to be getting a decent amount of visitors (about 4.4 million a month) even if its two closest competitors both attract a bigger audience at this point.

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One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and Hunch. Now Ask, arguably the original Q&A search engine (in that it encouraged searches to be asked as a question, not that the answers came from other humans), is waving its arms to remind people that you can ask questions and find answers there as well.

In fact, it is doing a little more than that. Today, it launched a Q&A tab on its site which taps into a new database of 300 million pairs of questions and answers, which it has crawled and indexed from around the Web. In other words, it is crawling the other Q&A sites to look for the best answers to a particular question. It is also applying some semantic and clustering filters to group similar questions together and to try to surface the most relevant results. It is more of a search engine for Q&A sites than a Q&A site itself. You can’t answer any of the questions, just search for what other people have answered on other sites.

At first glance, I find it a bit unsatisfying. I asked it, What is the best Q&A site? Yahoo Answers seemed to be the consensus, but no other choices even surfaced. I tried, What is the newest Q&A site? and it turns up only a single result from someone on Yahoo Answers asking how to go about creating a new Q&A site.

Does Ask even search Mahalo Answers? If it did, it would have found this question (”What other question and answer services have you used, tried or have found interesting besides Mahalo Answers?”) that includes a long list of more than 25 Q&A sites, many of which I had never even heard of (including Afraid To Ask, Ask An Owner, Blurtit, and Quenchmark).

It is not just that the answers on the handful of queries I tried weren’t so great, it is that taking a purely algorithmic approach to Q&A is the wrong answer. Obviously there are way too many Q&A sits out there and Ask is trying to find the best existing answers from everything that is out there across different Q&A sites. But offering Q&A search without letting people ask new questions or improve the results by offering their own answers kind of misses the whole point of Q&A. It is people helping out people to find the best answers to their questions. At least the Q&A startups are trying to move the ball forward by building a community and incentives around Q&A (Mahalo Answers), machine-learning and game-play (Hunch), or let you tap into your direct social circle for more trustworthy answers (Aardvark).

These sites get smarter the more people who use them and some of them offer personalized answers as well. The right answer to any question often depends on who is asking. Ask thinks there is one or two right answers for everyone.

(Image above courtesy PhotoXpress).

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First, I attempted to create a new user name for myself. I decided to go with MrCody, which is the name of my dog. Things seemed normal at first, until I noticed that my username at the top of the screen was now ‘mahendranunna’. A refresh later and Mahalo said “Welcome cddesai”. Being the inquisitive reporter that I am, I attempted to navigate through the user’s control panel. I could view the pages that they were currently managing. I tried to ask a question on Mahalo Answers under one of these accounts, and it seemed to work (the site is currently down so I can’t check to see if it actually posted). Over the course of the next twenty minutes, I was logged in as at least 8 different users. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing to jump between identities — sometimes a refresh would do it, other times I’d have the same username for a few minutes. It was bizarre.

We got in touch with CEO Jason Calacanis, who says that the problem is a “caching issue”, and that “the users aren’t actually logged in as another users (just appears that way).” Fine. But the site is still going down sporadically, and I still haven’t gotten the damn Email to activate the account I signed up for in the first place.

Disclosure: Jason Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference.

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Jason Calacanis wants to inject what he calls the “Skeeball economy” into Mahalo, his highly tuned site for creating and searching topic pages. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference). Since launching Mahalo two years ago, his staff and free workers on the Web (AKA, the Mahalo community) have built about 100,000 topic pages that tend to rank highly in Google search (about two thirds of his traffic comes from search engines). But Mahalo is hitting a ceiling in page creation because the wiki approach is just too slow and complicated. So it is launching a completely new design which makes it much easier to create pages and—here is the Skeeball part—rewards people with “Mahalo Dollars.”

These Mahalo Dollars, which Calacanis first started distributing in his Q&A site Mahalo Answers, can be converted into real money at an exchange rate of 75 cents to the dollar or can be saved up to spend in Mahalo itself in the future. Calacanis saw all the activity that was happening on Mahalo Answers, which he says broke one million users last month, and wanted to bring that over to Mahalo proper. Now anyone can claim a topic and create a search results page around that topic or keyword. There is one editor per page and Mahalo will split the AdSense revenues 50/50 for any page he or she makes and maintains. A typical page could generate $20 to $50 a year. If you make 100 of those, that turns out to be some nice pocket change.

The more pages you make, the more points you get and can climb from being a white belt to a black belt. With each new level, you get more privileges. At some point, members will be able to buy and sell pages they have claimed (for Mahalo Dollars, of course). In order to make page creation easier, Mahalo will now assist editors by turning up appropriate links, images, videos, news stories, questions and answers, and more. All you have to do is put in a search term, pick which elements should appear on the official topic page, and write up a short description. It is all driven by APIs in an attempt to bring the appropriate information to editor’s fingertips. Mahalo needs to go from 100,000 topic pages to millions of them, and fast. It is using these semi-automated approaches to get there.

Whether or not these will produce the best pages on any given topic remains to be seen. One problem I see is that claiming a topic and the associated revenues will be on a first-come, first serve basis. If someone comes along later with better domain expertise on, say, sushi (see screenshot below), he or she is out of luck. So there will be a bit of a land grab. With that, there is certainly a danger that people will shift from making spam pages to Mahalo pages. Calacanis dismisses this possibility. He notes that spammers will always be able to make more money on their own and that there are too many tripwires in Mahalo’s system to make it worth their while. Plus, Mahalo will yank any pages it deems too spammy.

The bigger challenge for him is to get people to come to Mahalo on their own instead of through search engines. People who come from search engines tend to be drive-by traffic. They look at 1.5 pages then leave. People who come directly or through referring sites look at 4 to 5 pages per visit. Calacanis is doing a lot to get more people to come to his site. Now he needs to get them to stay.

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Mahalo basically duplicated the Charlie Rose set (all black, single round table) for a total cost, he says, of $20,000. He says he can create a HD show for $300/episode for an editor, makeup, etc.

The show is good, and it’s fun to watch a professional actor begin to understand the power of social media, where you can gain a lot of devoted fans very quickly – with the only downside being that you have to listen to what they say back to you. Pollack is handling it well, talking about the chat feature on the video show and how bewildered he is by Twitter. And he also seems to like the fact that he can do literally anything on the show that he wants – swear, be silent, talk for as long as he likes, whatever. Between his talking about what it’s like for a professional actor to do whatever he likes without interference, he throws in a few good comedic bits as well. My favorite – a damned good impersonation of Jack Nicholson at about the 2:15 mark of this video:

An email from Kevin:

Although we are only two weeks old, and are still the lil’ show that could, we’re hoping to improve the creative content on the internet, if not the future of “Intervision.”
As you have been told by Jason, and can clearly see, we are utterly grassroots, but you should know we are determined to stay that way. While the quality of the production will improve as we work out the kinks, I never want it to feel too professional and NEVER tv-slick. Basically, we’ve got a barn (Calacanis’ Mahalo studio) and some costumes (whatever my guests want to wear) and we’re puttin’ on a show!
FYI, the show is every Sunday at 5pm, PDT, streaming live on Kevinpollakschatshow.com, and we take questions LIVE from the chat room on the site, as well as from Twitter.com at @kevinpollak. Also, a day later each episode is available on iTunes as a free podcast, as well as on blip.tv, and then shortly thereafter available at Kevinpollakschatshow.com.
A list of upcoming confirmed guests:
April 5th: Actor Jason Antoon and Tesla Motors and SpaceX Founder/CEO Elon Musk
April 12th: Star of the documentary “Super High Me,” comedian Doug Benson, who will be discussing California’s effort to legalize marijuana, and the “Pit Bull of Comedy,” “Yid Vicious,” and a new star of the Las Vegas strip, Bobby Slayton.
April 19th: Academy Award winning writer of “The Usual Suspects,” Chris McQuarrie

Others Confirmed:
Felicia Day: Creator/Star of the internet comedy MEGA-hit, “The Guild”
Jon Hamm: Golden Globe winner/star of “Mad Men”
Jon Favreau: Director of Iron Man (and just started on the sequel)
Alex Albrecht: Co-Creator/Host of Diggnation and The Totally Rad Show,
John Krasinski: Actor, “The Office”
Luke Wilson: Actor (Old School, etc)
A ton of other VERY recognizable names and faces that I am still reaching out to from the tech world and showbiz, not to mention YOU, if you’d care to come on and chat…
Thanks VERY much for your time and interest in helping our lil’ show.
-Kevin

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Update: we exchanged e-mails with a company representative, who informed us that this is actually “old news” and that the Series C round of $30 million has actually closed a couple of months ago.

The company raised $6 million in Series A financing exactly two years ago from Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions, followed by a $10 million round by Morton Meyerson and 21st Century Technology Fund. If ChaCha closes the $30 million Series C round (see update above), the total capital invested in the company will amount up to a whopping $46 million.

In case you’ve never heard of ChaCha, it’s essentially a search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a “search guide”, via the web, text message or a mobile website (answers are only provided by mobile). We’ve called it a dumb idea in the past, and unscalable on numerous occasions, but it’s not the only startup that’s taking a crack at a human-powered Q&A service (Mahalo launched a similar service last month, Answerly is another one).

We’ve reached out to the company to confirm that they’re raising more venture capital, as well as the names of the investors. (see update above)

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Mahalo Answers, the just-launched Q&A service that is part Yahoo Answers, part Google Answers has just proven that people will actually pay for valuable information. At least, they will when strippers are involved.

This morning a representative for the The Stripper Method – a video series that invites viewers to watch “two former strippers, now housewives, business owners and mothers, as they teach secret stripper techniques for use at home with your significant others” – asked how they could book the video’s stars on a nationally broadcast TV show or radio show.

Mahalo member budgallant answered the call, offering a detailed guide to contacting local radio hosts, reaching Public Access Television, and, if all else failed, staging a protest (you can see the full answer here).

In return for his answer, the question’s originator (a user by the name of vegasundressed) has just awarded budgallant with $100 in Mahalo Dollars (the site’s virtual currency). Budgallant will now be able to exchange those Mahalo Dollars for real cash, less a 25% cut taken by Mahalo.

(Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).

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Mahalo is now answering your questions. The human-curated search engine/ condensed wiki guide is adding a Q&A service called Mahalo Answers to its mix. It is a combination of Yahoo Answers and the long-defunct Google Answers, with some cute avatars and virtual currency thrown in. (Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).

Like Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask or answer any question. But Mahalo Answers throws in a twist. If someone really wants to encourage the best answers, they can offer a tip in “Mahalo Dollars,” which can be funded through PayPal and are convertible into real dollars once a member has earned at least 40 of them. For those of you who remember Google Answers, it paired questioners with vetted researchers who found answers for a fee. This is slightly different in that questions are not assigned to a specific researcher. As many people can answer it as they want and all compete for the tip. Furthermore, the tip can be rescinded by the questioner if he or she is not satisfied with any of the answers.

To keep people honest, there is a reputation system. If a tip is withheld, you have to explain why. Reneg on too many tips, and nobody will want to answer any of your questions.

There is also a point system. Calacanis says he was inspired by many of the gaming startups at TechCrunch50, and how they were designed to keep players engaged by getting them to constantly level up. On Mahalo Answers, you get points for asking questions, answering them, providing the “best” answers, as well as adding links and gaining friends. (And guess who is the member with the most points accumulated during the closed beta? Calacanis).

As you get more points, you progress through different belt levels (white, yellow, green, etc.). It’s like a game. The higher belt you have, the more of an “expert” you are. One of the features of the site is that people can ask members direct questions. The more points you have, the more you can charge for your answers. Mahalo takes a 25 percent cut when Mahalo Dollars are converted back into regular currency Calacanis says:

If you can make knowledge into a game and help people make living, it is very powerful.

He considers Mahalo Answers to be the third plank of his company’s strategy, with human-powered search and abbreviated wiki guides being the first two. When someone answers a question, they are encouraged to add links, photos, and videos as part of their answer. Mahalo harvests all of those links, and the best answers become part of its topic guides. “The question and answer service becomes a way to make our guide better,” says Calacanis. That is, if enough people use it.

Mahalo is essentially paying for traffic here, or rather getting its users to pay for traffic. The prospect of making tips from other users will be the main draw for many visitors. The question is: Will that be enough to jumpstart more organic growth by improving upon the Q&A format and seeding the site with some really good answers? Or does Yahoo Answers with its 154 million monthly unique visitors worldwide (comScore) have too much momentum to ever be challenged?

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This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

That is the equivalent of about 57 startups with ten people each. And those are just the ones that we or other news outlets have been able to confirm. Our list of tips is much longer than that and we are working through it to confirm as many as we can. For instance, Cake Financial has laid off 30 percent of its staff, or 6 people.

Another company with unreported layoffs earlier this week was Meraki, which I’ve confirmed let go 20 percent of its staff (10 people). That makes Meraki the third Sequoia-backed company to announce layoffs this week. (The other two were Mahalo and imeem). Sequoia urged all of its portfolio companies to make cut-backs earlier this month.

At least most of these startups are already done with their layoffs, unlike Yahoo which announced a 10 percent cut is coming but won’t say who exactly is losing their jobs for another few weeks. Layoffs are bad enough, but don’t prolong the misery.

This past week alone, tech companies have laid off 13,809 people:

Company–––––––––Layoffs

Xerox————3,000
Daptiv————–21
Haute Secure———3
Cake Financial——–6
Mercent————-6
Dell————-8,900
imeem————-20
Mahalo————-6
TicketMaster——300
Eons—————8
Veoh————–15
Yahoo———-1,500
Wikia—————3
Meraki————-10
Break.com———-11

Total———-13,809

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

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Update: Why this is news. There is a lot of discussion, even outrage, in the comments and elsewhere about my decision to post this email, against the express wishes of its author and his subsequent request that it be taken down.  We are not going to do that.

Like it or not, this document is news.  Its author, Jason Calacanis, is the CEO of Mahalo, which announced a layoff yesterday.  (He is also a TechCrunch partner apart from Mahalo in that we put on the TechCrunch50 conference togeher). At the time I posted this on Wednesday at 9:45 PM ET, the Mahalo layoffs were being discussed so vigorously that the topic was at the top of Techmeme.  Although Calacanis had already written a blog post on the subject, he went into much more detail about why he felt he needed to go through the layoffs and how he went about doing so in the email.  He also updated in the email how many people are still employed at Mahalo (30 full-time, 50 freelancers) in response to some reports.

The email went out to nearly 9,000 people. It was not a private email.  And Jason Calacanis is not aprivate individual. He is the CEO of a high-profile startup and an Internet celebrity in his own right.

More importantly, the email shed light on an event that had happened earlier that day and that many media outlets were reporting on and speculating about.  Here was a document from the CEO himself outlining his inner thinking on what had just happened.  It was news.

I decided to publish the it in full, unadorned because it speaks for itself.  Publishing it was no different than what we did when we recently put up Jerry Yang’s email to employees about the latest layoffs at Yahoo.  Nobody complained when we published Jerry Yang’s email.  Nobody thought it unusual for the Wall Street Journal to publish in full then-Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse’s internal  “Peanut Butter Manifesto” outlining the problms at Yahoo a couple years ago.   News organizations big and small publish documents that come across their desks all the time. It is part of our job of informing our readers about events in the world.

There is no copyright issue here and there is no issue of me personally breaching an agreement.  Nothing is off the record unless a reporter agrees that it is off the record prior to receiving information. I made no such agreement and Calacanis cannot unilaterally impose such restrictions simply by writing “Do Not Reprint” at the top of his email.  Although I respect his desire in general to control who sees his email newsletters, in this case the news value of the document outweighs his personal wishes.

Beyond the layoffs at Mahalo, which are tiny in the grand scheme of things (six people), the email speaks to something that is happening across the startup economy. Every startup CEO is at least thinking about the need to cut back right now, if not going through the same ordeal that Calacanis had to go through. Others can learn from his experience.  He actually has some good advice. Read the email.  The fact that he was able to minimize the number of layoffs to only six people and how he did that is far more interesting than whether or not TechCrunch should have published the email in the first place.

Given the challenging economic environment, we’ve decided to make some pre-preemptive cuts at Mahalo.

Although we’ve got a significant amount of cash on hand and the business is ahead of schedule in terms of traffic (4m uniques a month, double where we thought we would be at this point), we’re fairly certain that the advertising climate for the next two years will be severely depressed. To ignore this obvious fact would be irresponsible.

We’ve laid off a just under 10% of our full-time staff, cut our overhead by doing smart things like renting desks (we have six desks/offices available fyi), and reorganized our editorial department to focus on freelance positions over in-house editors. The net result of the effort is we are giving Mahalo another year of “dry powder” (or runway) to complete our mission.

We can now operate past 2012 even if we never make any advertising revenue, and truth be told, building advertising-based companies is my specialty (the last two, Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. each broke 10m a year revenue between their third and fourth years). Perhaps we’re being too conservative, but I’ve rarely heard of companies that went out of business because they made cuts too early, and I’ve heard of many who have reported the opposite.

As the CEO of the company, the responsibility for these cuts is mine and mine alone. Obviously, I did anticipate that the market would correct and that is why we raised $20 million over two rounds of funding before we launched. That move ensures that Mahalo will be able to get to profitability and ride through what is sure to be a very deep and painful recession.

While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression, I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road.

It’s my responsibility to make this hard decision, and I don’t take it lightly. To the people impacted, I’m very sorry that I wasn’t able to anticipate this better. It’s my fault and I’m sorry that you’ve got to bear the burden of my inability to better prepare.

Update: We still have 30 full-time folks in our office and 50+ full-time freelancers–so the reports of us cutting 1/3rd of our staff and having only 10 people are incorrect (gossip bloggers incorrect…what?!?!).

How we handled it
————————
Since many firms are rightsizing–or considering rightsizing–their operations now, I thought I’d try to explain how we handled the issue at Mahalo as openly as possible. Additionally, I thought I would go into how I handled it at my first company, Silicon Alley Reporter, where we cut our staff from 70 to 15 people over the course a long, painful year. My hope is that by getting into some of these details, I can share what I’ve learned about this painful process, and that you might be able to give me feedback on how we did and what we could do better.

The timing of the economic downturn and the need for these layoffs could not have come at a worse time for me. As many of you know, I’ve been out of the country for over two weeks visiting Athens, London and Seoul. We did 90% of reorganization while I was, quite literally, traveling around the world.

Speed
————————
The most important thing to realize in a situation like we’re facing is that, chances are, you cannot act too quickly, but you can easily act too slowly. For this reason, I decided that we had to come up with, and execute on, a cost-savings plan within two weeks. There is little upside in pushing out hard decisions like this slowly because of the simple fact that you’re burning gas while you’re deciding.

If you’re going to make cuts, set a time table based on analysis, strategy, debate and execution. For this process, I gave us about five days to analyze our situation and five days to develop a plan–there was some overlap obviously. We spent two days debating the right strategy and we executed the majority of the plan yesterday.

Again, there are four steps: analysis, strategy, debate and execution.

Emotion
————————
The six worst days of my professional career, on an emotional basis, were the four days I laid people off at Silicon Alley Reporter, the day I switched the name of Silicon Alley Reporter to VentureReporter, and yesterday when we did our layoffs/reorganization at Mahalo. There is nothing worse than looking into the eyes of the team that you’ve cultivated, challenged, pushed, and won and lost with, and having to tell them that they have been cut from the team. I’m sure this is how the coach of a sports team feels like at the end of training camp when many times they have to let go of great people who’ve done amazing work, but due to circumstances, they can’t keep them on the team.

It’s emotional, it’s personal, and it sucks. I’m not one to get depressed, but I would be lying if I told you that I haven’t been depressed about having to do these layoffs. While emotion is great when you’re in the heat of competition, it really doesn’t help that much when you’re doing strategy work. As such, you need to get the members of your management team to agree that you’re going to pursue your very difficult job with as little emotion as possible. If it helps, pretend you’re an outside consultant and you’ve been given the task to “save the company” with these cuts–because that’s not far off from the truth.

In other words, try and detach yourself from the emotion of the situation so you can make the right decisions. You’re going to have to tap into that emotional stuff later anyway–conserve it during your analysis and strategy.

Analysis: Assessing where you’re at and setting a goal
————————
The first step was getting out our P&L and looking at each line item in detail. For our business, we have a large editorial group, a modest technology team, almost no marketing costs except for our Mahalo Daily video show, and extremely tight overhead. We haven’t built our sales group yet, so that line item doesn’t exist. We do have some modest Google Adsense revenue which we have been testing for the past couple of months.

We had exactly three years of capital in the bank when we started this process, and while that is 2-10x the runway of most startups, I set the goal for the company to reach four years of runway. Absurd? Too conservative? Perhaps, but I’d rather be conservative until I know what exactly is going on in the market.

In order to get there, we needed to do some combination of cutting costs and increasing our revenue.

The goal was now set: four years of runway.

Analysis Part Two: Line by lining your P&L
————————
It was fairly clear in looking at our budget that we were spending two editorial dollars for every technology dollar. Our focus on editorial is what got us to four million unique visitors a month, and a nice loyal base of users at Mahalo.com, but the truth is we’ve been underspending on technology. This made it very clear to us that we had to cut the editorial spending as much as possible while maintaining the editorial integrity of our product.

The truth is that the massive editorial we’re building wasn’t getting us the bang for the buck that our technology was at *this* moment. At different points, investment in technology, editorial, or marketing can grow your business and it’s important to not get locked into a specific amount of spending on any one of those items. However, when you have venture capital–and a large amount of it–you can avoid the issue. This is the unhealthy truth about having outside investment: it distances you from the truth.

As a venture-backed entrepreneur, you have to be able see through the fog of millions of dollars of investment in order to find your way sometimes.

Question every dollar you’re spending and ask yourself: “Is there a better use for this dollar?”

When we “peeled back the onion” of our editorial spending, it became very clear that our most efficient work force was not the group of editors we had in our office, nor the remote workers we have in Manila (doing data entry type work), but rather the $10-12 an hour “remote guides” we have working from home. These editors cost us, all in, less than half of the folks in our office due to things like overhead, benefits, lunch, and equipment. The workers in Manila are half the cost of our “remote guides,” but they are 1/2 to 1/4 as effective (depending on the task).

This should have been more obvious to me since we pioneered the work-from-home model at Weblogs, Inc., where we had 300 bloggers working from home with only three or four people managing them–a 75 to one ratio (Judith Meskill actually managed 150 at one point herself God love her!).

Of course, when you’ve got a lot of venture capital and you want to grow fast, sometimes you give up on the most efficient model for a model that goes faster. That makes logical sense: overspend to take marketshare. Having people in the office was more costly, but it did get us to over four million users a month and 100,000 pages built. When folks pull up a list of “future search companies,” we’re always number one on the list because of this investment in content. So, it was well worth it.

In phase two of the company–and given the economy–we had to rethink our strategy.

Next we looked at our Mahalo Daily video show and realized that we were actually covering about 25% of the costs. Not too shabby, but not enough to justify a project that is not core. Since it is getting over two million views a month–25 million a year–it would be a shame to stop doing it. We asked ourselves how do we get this closer to break-even? It became fairly clear that cutting some costs here and getting closer to break-even–say to 50-70%–would be a good idea. As such, we moved the video editors from full-time to contract basis. Problem solved.

Strategy Part One: The obvious stuff (i.e. office space)
————————-
The most obvious things we found on our P&L were operational things regarding our facility: office space, phones, servers, etc. We swapped our communication systems out and saved $1.5k a month, we rented out a bunch of space, we cleared out some other offices to rent them, and we cut down on non-essential travel (think: my never-ending speaking gigs). The saving here was solid so we moved on to the hard stuff referred to coldly as “human capital” by accountants. People.

Strategy Part Two: The hard stuff (i.e. people)
————————-
The editorial analysis above gave us a clear area where we could save a lot of money: by moving aggressively to a freelance, work-from-home workforce. This also gave us a fairly good idea of how to handle our layoffs and cuts: try to do a reorganization where we shifted our full-time editors at our office to work at home freelancers. Instead of simply laying off a bunch of our editors we could offer them the ability to work from home as consultants.

The good news? Most of the editors took this offer to become freelancers, and in fact many of them seemed to have preferred it. Some were justifiably not happy with it.

In life, sometimes you have to learn things two or three times. One thing I’ve learned two or three times now is that writers, in large part, like to work from home in their pajamas with a big cup of coffee and their loved ones by their side. I know this to be true because most of my e-mails to you guys come when I’m sitting in the garden with my laptop, a cup of joe, and Taurus and Fondue curled up at my feet.

Must. Learn. To. Learn. From. My. Learnings.

Strategy Part Three: Revenues
————————-
We immediately started running more aggressive Google Adsense, and we doubled our revenue. Great for the bottom line, not great for user experience. We’ll keep thinking that one through obviously. Additionally, I’m personally working on five content-partnership type deals that will drive revenue. If we land one of them, we’ll cut 10% of our burn–I’m sure I can close at least one or two of them by the end of the year.

Bottom line: We’re getting focused on revenues a little earlier than we thought we would, and that’s never a bad thing in my mind. However, our goal is to build a service that has 7-10m unique visitors a month. We don’t want to get to break-even and stay for 4m for ever. That’s a nice business, but we want to build an EPIC business.

Debate
————————-
This past weekend, the day after I got back from my trip, I had my management team over to discuss what strategy we would execute. It didn’t help that I was massively jet-lagged, but we got through it. We discussed cuts and what the company would look like after the reorganization. We decided to do the cuts at the end of the week, but after making that agreement, I decided we would do them on Tuesday in order to avoid it leaking and in order to get the company focused on the product roadmap again.

The fact is, too much debate is probably not going to help. As the leader of the organization, you can take all the information in and make a quick decision. If you cut too deep, you can hire folks back, and given the economy, it’s better you secure your company’s survival right now and think about scaling up when the market gives you some signs of hitting a bottom. There is no sign of a bottom right now–despite what the clowns on CNBC might say.

The bottom is when Google and Apple miss a quarter and/or lay people off.

The bottom is when unemployment numbers go down and consumer confidence comes up (not the other way around).

The bottom is when the massive wave of variable, ARM mortgages come up in 2009.

Execution
————————-
Having done layoffs four other times there are specific mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned. They are:

1. Don’t spread layoffs over multiple rounds: This is a horrible idea because it creates massive fear and uncertainty inside of your organization. If you’re going to do layoffs, do them once, do them quickly, and explain to people that you’re doing just that. At Silicon Alley Reporter, I cut and waited for revenue to come back–it didn’t. So I cut some more and waited some more. Nothing. I did this four times and it created an environment of constant depression and fear inside the company. If I had more experience back then (I was only 29 years old), I would have looked at the 500k in revenue and said “we’re going down to 10 people and we’ll build back up as the market allows us.”

2. Don’t lay people off one at a time, do it as a group. When I did layoffs at Silicon Alley Reporter the first time, I brought people in one at a time thinking it would be more humane. I thought I’d give folks more one-on-one time. The result was that folks were waiting at their desks and talking to people on IM the whole time waiting for their call to come into my office. It’s best to ask all the affected people–and the folks not affected–to come into the room at the same time. Explain what’s happening–that you’re having layoffs or reorganizing–and let the folks who are not affected leave.

3. Don’t sugar coat it: You need to be 100% honest and up front with people about why you’re doing it and what your decision was based on (i.e. how you decided who to keep and why, what cuts you made and why, etc). Give folks as much time as possible to discuss the issues together as this is going to be very emotional and brutal for everyone involved–including you.

4. Cutting salaries over headcount is *generally* not a good idea: If you cut people’s salaries 10% across the board, everyone in the organization gets really pissed off because they either can’t cover their bills or they have to downsize their lives. You then have your best folks looking for jobs and the folks who can’t find jobs staying at the company. You just lowered your effectiveness and that sucks. It’s much better to layoff the folks you need to and keep the folks you have happy and focused on completing the mission. There are a few exceptions to this, including sales people and senior management. If you’re going to face a radically different market, you might need to reboot your comp plan for sales for everyone to feel good about it.

5. Be as generous as you can: Give severance even though you don’t have to. Vest as much extra stock as you can even though you don’t have to. Offer freelance work to as many folks as you can. Offer to give amazing references to everyone on the team and to introduce them to as many potential employers as you can. If you think there is a chance that you’ll have open positions available again at some point, offer them to people.

6. Don’t drag it out: It’s better to do these type of things at the end of the day, and if folks are done with their questions, let folks leave. Folks have families and a lot of issues to deal with, and there is no need to keep them around for the entire day or for a couple of more days. The folks who are left can clean up the loose ends.

7. Get everyone focused again: After the layoffs, you have to make sure everyone understands what the goals are–even if they haven’t changed–and get folks ready to kill it again. You can’t expect folks to not be in some form of shock for a bit, but you have explain to them that the reality is that the company must march on and complete its destiny. It gets easier over time.

Wrapping up
————————-
Frankly, I was wondering if I should even write this e-mail. It’s very personal and hard to do these things, and since I’ve done it so many times, I’m thinking these insights might be helpful to you, my loyal friends.

In related news, it’s interesting to watch the negativity and obnoxiousness of some bloggers and anonymous commenters while these layoffs have been going on. You would think that during times of hardship, folks would attempt to take the high-road and be supportive of each other. It’s amazing to me how on blogs people just lose their empathy. Almost everyone is going to be suffering during this historic time and it’s best, as a group, to support each other.

I’m so glad I moved to this cozy e-mail conversation with all of you guys.

The technology industry is a small community, I’ve learned, and when things go bad you can really tell what people are made of. Some folks are incredibly supportive while others take the opportunity to slam folks. Being an entrepreneur–creating something from nothing–is one of the hardest things a person can do. If folks are out there trying they deserve our support.

Be good to each other.

Note: Please feel free to forward this to folks you think it would help, but please don’t republish this on the web. Note: If you want to subscribe to my email list you can do so at
http://www.tinyurl.com/jasonslist
______________________________

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In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs, including outsourcing much of its editorial department to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at around 5 or 6, but that number could change depending on how well the freelancers work out for the company.

From his blog post:

While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road.

It’s my responsibility to make this hard decision and I don’t take it lightly. To the people impacted I’m very sorry that I wasn’t able to anticipate this better. It’s my fault and I’m sorry that you’ve got to bear the burden of my inability to better prepare.

The news isn’t surprising given the waves of layoffs we’ve been seeing in the current economic climate, especially given the fact that Mahalo investor Sequoia Capital recently presented the CEOs of its portfolio companies with a PowerPoint Presentation of Doom emphasizing the need to cut costs.

Aside from the grim tone about the economy, Calacanis does show optimism for the future of Mahalo. The cost-saving measures will give the company an extra year of “runway”, allowing Mahalo to stay afloat until 2012 without making any revenue, he says (which should hopefully be more than enough time to weather the storm).

Disclosure: Jason Calacanis and Mahalo are partners of ours in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference.

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When Mahalo launched about 16 months ago, we called it a human-powered search engine and began thinking of it as a Google competitor. But it’s so-called “guide pages” for topics as diverse as the Boston Marathon and Patriotic Drunk Rednecks provide not only links but quick facts, making Mahalo an editor-driven, Wikipedia competitor as well. And with a new site-wide design launching today, Mahalo sharpens its focus on the news cycle and competes more directly with sites like CNN and a multitude of news aggregators.

CEO Jason Calacanis explains how inspiration for the new design came from noticing how a core group of about 10-15,000 visitors refresh Mahalo’s homepage several times a day to check for new featured links, which change 2-3 times per day and direct users to guide pages about current events. The new design enhances Mahalo’s standing as a news aggregator by making these featured items more prominent on the homepage. A new “top news” box (see above) dominates the top left area of the homepage and displays excerpts from relevant guide pages.

But most importantly, Mahalo now features a new “liveblog” system that delivers one liners about world news as it breaks, such as “Man arrested after threatening bar patrons with a chainsaw” and “Brooke Hogan Says ‘No’ to Playboy”. Calacanis recalls how Peter Rojas pioneered the practice of liveblogging at Engadget and suggests that Mahalo is essentially applying the same technique to the entire world. Each post to the liveblog gets placed into a category, such as “Crime” or “Politics”, and most contain at least one link to a related guide page.

While 100 full time editors work to create Mahalo’s 100,000+ guide pages, Mahalo has employed only 4-8 full time employees to work on the liveblog (although they will work collectively around the clock). To spice things up a bit, Mahalo has set up a dedicated liveblog section where you can watch the employees and ask them questions as they work live on Ustream.

Calacanis says Mahalo plans to break out each news category into its own section and give each its own Ustream feed. Later on, we may also see RSS feeds for each category and a proper API to syndicate the liveblog’s news items elsewhere.

Disclosure: We have no financial interest in Mahalo. However, Jason Calacanis is a partner on our annual TechCrunch50 Conference.

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Check out Mahalo Daily’s “CinemaCrunch” review of last night’s Batman screening in Los Angeles. Jason Calacanis calls it “definitely the best superhero movie ever made…hands down.” The key, everyone says, is to see it in IMAX.

Thanks to the 600 people who attended, particularly the handful of people who dressed up as the Joker. Some people camped out for 24 hours to get in because the tickets that MySpace gave out were first come, first serve (ours were reserved seats).

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People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) and the guidelines sent to beta testers (reproduced after the break).

Like Mahalo, YouBundle is more of a Web guide than an actual search engine. Bundles of Web links, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Amazon product descriptions, and uploaded photos and documents are created around different topics. These can be anything from “VC Funding Resources” to “Tibetan Buddhism” to “Apple Rumors Sites.” Bundlers add titles, tags, and descriptions to each bundle. The company explains to beta testers in its guidelines:

A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.

You should consider a bundle your work of art. . . . Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.

Unlike Mahalo, YouBundle does not rely on a paid staff of editors to create its topic guides. It is all done by the community. While Mahalo does incorporate some social feedback as well, it is more controlled. Each submission is reviewed before being included on a Mahalo page. This policy is one way to control spam from clogging up the system.

On YouBundle, the community does all the work. So in this sense it is more akin to Topicle or Wikia Search. The latter is a slightly different beast, since it truly is an algorithmic search engine whose results are re-ordered and modified by the community. But like Wikia Search, YouBundle relies on its community to flag spam and inappropriate content. Any bundles tagged “SPAM,” “PORN,” or “TOS,” are reviewed and moderated. (The TOS tag refers to bundles that violate the site’s Terms of Service).

The YouBundle community is also be able to vote the best topic pages up by “bumping” them, or vote them down by “dumping” them. Dumps are “anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps,” says the guideines. Members can also “bag and tag” other people’s bundles. Bagging a bundle is like bookmarking it as one of your favorites, and once you do that you can up to three tags to improve the categorization of the site.

I was not able to test the site out myself, so I can’t say if it is producing better results than Mahalo, Topicle or Wikia Search. But the steep rise in Mahalo’s traffic, much of it driven by the SEO juice its pages have, is no doubt a motivating factor here. According to comScore, Mahalo attracted 2.6 million unique visitors worldwide in April, up from zero when it launched last summer. Total pageviews were 5.6 million.

Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is a partner of ours who helps us put on the TechCrunch50 conference. Neither TechCrunch, its employees, nor Michael Arrington owns any stake in Mahalo.

Here is the full text of the guidelines sent to YouBundle beta testers:

Bundling Guidelines

A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.

You should consider a bundle your work of art. In order to assist you in creating this work of art, we are able to Parse and display thumbnails and unique information for the following types of links

* Web Page links- We will call and display a thumbnail of the site screen shot
* YouTube Videos – Just enter the address URL and we will call and display a Thumbnail of the video and relevant video information
* Photos – If you enter a link of a photo extension (.jpg, png, gif etc…) We will call and display the thumbnail of this.
* Flickr Photos – All you have to do is enter the Flickr page of the photo and we will automatically grab and display the thumbnail.
* Documents- PDF’s, .DOCs ad Excel will be displayed in their own section.
* Links to Other Bundles. These will also be in their own section with a preview of the other bundle. Good when you need to refer to another bundle with more specific or generalized information on the subject in questions
* Amazon Links- Consider to include a link or two to a relevant Amazon product. We will automatically grab the photo thumbnail for display

Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.

Describing your bundle.

* Your Bundle Title is going to be the First and only thing that many people will see. Therefore make it unique, focused and interesting as possible.
* Your Description can be any length and should give a concise summary of your bundle subject and maybe even a little history and unique content.
* Your Bundle Tags are how you would subcategorize your bundle and can be used in a number of ways. For example, lets say that you made a bundle on 67 Ford Mustang’s. The category of choice for that bundle could either be under Transportation. However the category choice is a very general thing. To further sub-catagorize your bundle you will want to add tags. Tags can be both specific to the bundle and used in other fashions. First lets talk about the obvious method. You could for example tag this bundle
o Ford
o Mustang
o 1967
o Fastbacks
o Hot Cars
* Having these tags will make it show up in searches used for these and also cross reference with other bundles sharing the same tag. You can add up to 10 tags when you create a bundle
* The other way to use tags is not to directly describe the contents of your bundle, but maybe to identify it as part of some bundle association or group. For example maybe I am part of an internet forum on mustangs called ‘Mustang Talk.’ I can also tag my bundle ‘Mustang Talk’ (or whatever tag we agree on) and then on the forum I just have to refer the other users to come to youbundle and search for that unique tag – which will return everything returned as such. The functionality is open to be used as your creativity dictates

Browsing and Tagging other peoples bundles

A Unique and fun feature of YouBundle that can keep you occupied forever is our Bag and Tag feature. This allows you to do 2 different things

* BAG – Essentially like saving the bundle to your favorites. Meaning that it will be there in your ‘Favorite Bag’ to go back to and reference any time you like. This is a great way to bookmark your favorite bundle for easy access
* TAG – Just like when you make a bundle – you are allowed to add tags, when you browse other peoples bundles you can add up to 3 tags to those bundles as well. When you tag another persons bundle – a number of things will happen
o That tag gets added to the bundle Tag Cloud – so it will cause the tag to grow in weight.
o That tag gets added to your personal tag cloud on your homepage and associated with that bundle. This being another way for you to categorize and easily access the bundle
* By tagging you can help to categorize other peoples bundles into the correct place and at the same time increase your collection. Another very useful feature of being able to Tag other peoples bundles is to really put them in their place.
* Meaning that you can start clubs and tag the bundles according to the club. Something like ‘Best Bundle’ or the likes. You can also help the community with quality control. Instead of reporting spam via a link, we are asking community members to tag bundles containing spam links as ‘SPAM’ and our Moderators will routinely check this tag and delete the offending bundles and accounts. Even if another user has already given the tag to the offending bundle, please tag it yourself as well as the more people that tag it – the faster it will be brought to our attention. A full list of moderation tags you can use are as follows (Please use all CAPS)
o SPAM – We will review and take action on bundles marked as SPAM
o PORN – We will immediately delete bundles with links to PORN
o TOS – Bundles that link to pages that violate our TOS, such as pages that.
o BOTD – Bundle of the Day. If you want to recommend a Bundle for Bundle of the Day. Please tag it BOTD and we will review and consider.

Bundle Rating

You can also show your approval or distaste for a bundle by bumping or dumping it. When you Bump a bundle, your username will show up on the bundle to show that you approve. However when you Dump a bundle, it will be anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps.

FeedBack

As we are currently in Beta Testing – this is a work in Progress and we are constantly changing things and listening to your feedback. If you find a bug, have suggestion, or just want to chat a bit about the industry, please use email us at

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Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SAI decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.

The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.

Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.

But what are you gonna do? At least SAI acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.

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Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo has borrowed from the Simon Fuller Idol franchise in its search for the new host for Mahalo Daily by announcing Mahalo Idol.

Potential hosts are asked to respond to the above video on YouTube showing their best side, or turn up to a casting call in Los Angeles April 19. Idol style host wannabes will be purged until there are five finalists, who return one week later to pitch to the celebrity judges with one person being picked to become Mahalo Idol, the new host of Mahalo Daily. The site doesn’t give specifics but it would be a safe bet that the entire process, complete with judging, will be filmed and shown on Mahalo. Men need not apply, Mahalo is seeking female hosts only.

Jason’s embrace of quality television such as Idol is classy, but copying everything down to the logo is a lawsuit waiting to happen, unless he used the Mahalo millions to legally purchase the rights.

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Belmont resigned from the Mahalo Daily podcast last week after only 5 months, with a relatively cool send off from Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis.

Prior to working for Calacanis, Belmont worked for CNET.com, where she produced and co-hosted shows including Buzz Out Loud, MP3 Insider and Crave. She also regularly appears on programs on DL.TV, MSNBC, CNBC, the G4 Network, PC Gamer, and This Week in Tech.

Belmont featured in our list of geek chicks to watch March 21.

image credit: Veronica Belmont

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Webb Alert

Michael discribed Morgan Webb’s daily tech show as “a winner” and even stays up till 2am to catch new episodes. Occasional mens mag model Morgan Webb delivers tech related news from across the world. Our August 2007 review here.

GeekBrief.TV

The favorite podcast of the occasionally drunk, and mostly single team at CrunchGear, Cali Lewis delivers a daily dose of tech news, with a stronger focus on gadgets and geeky stories.

Mahalo Daily

Not content with simply taking on Google, Jason Calacanis hired Veronica Belmont for a daily show about pretty much anything and everything. Pure, blissful, fluff.

Loaded

Former TechCrunch writer Natali Del Conti talks tech news for CNet. Strangely CNet doesnt support embedding so you’ll need to click here to view the show. See our February 2007 review here.

Pop17

New York’s Sarah Meyers interviews interesting people and provides commentary on society as a whole.

MobLogic.TV

Former WallStrip host and CBS new media star Lindsay Campbell hosts this new show billed as “a running conversation about the news that affects you and a reality check on mainstream media.”

Update: due to strong commenter support:

Mobuzz.TV

Update 2: Michelle from 1938Media should have been included

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Helpful advice includes (our interpretation):

• If you do meetings, have them over lunch, because you shouldn’t let your employees eat alone
• Don’t provide people with phones, they can always use their own cellphones, and this saves money
• Buy a decent espresso machine and provide food in the office, because you don’t want your staff to ever stop working, this way you keep them in the office every minute of every day
• Buy people who work hard a computer for home, so they can work after hours, on weekends and public holidays
• Urinary catheters are cheap, hook each employee up to one so they don’t waste minutes going to the restroom

OK, so I made the last point up. Here’s my favorite one though (direct quote):

• “Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

Apparently having a life isn’t “for realz” in Calacanis’ playbook so a note to possible Mahalo employees: expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal. Up to 18 hours a day for $30-35,000 (what I’ve heard is the going rate for base Mahalo employees) , you’re never allowed to go outside during this time or have a proper break…. sounds like a great place to work.

Update: via Stilgherrian, 37 Signals responds to Jason’s post by suggesting you should fire the workaholics.

Update 2: Allen Stern at Centernetworks makes some strong points about the need for personal space and breathing time here.

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If anyone can build it, Alvey and co-founder Craig Wood (also of Weblogs, Inc.) can. Alvey has been building content management systems since at least the mid nineties, including systems for Business Week and TV Guide. He was also the architect of Weblogs, Inc. and their associated CMS, Blogsmith. AOL acquired Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005.

Crowd Fusions seems to be the next generation of Blogsmith, since it includes lots of content types other than blogs. The company, which is based in New York, hasn’t launched yet, but we hear they’re busy raising a first round of capital.

Alvey co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Jason Calacanis. Calacanis launched his new startup, Mahalo, in May 2007.

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The idea of social networking site aggregation or single landing page isn’t new, we’ve covered startups aiming to provide a similar service, such as MyLifeBrand, ProfileLinker and Loopster, but none have really captured the imagination of the broader internet. Mahalo is trying to better these services by becoming the front page destination for those looking to access sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and others.

Setup is easy enough. You simply add your user name or user ID into the boxes provided, and it then pulls your profiles from each service. It’s not perfect yet, for example you have to provide your full URL for Facebook (which they noted) and LinkedIn (which they didn’t note). From there you can visit each page via tabs on Mahalo itself. I found that maybe half of the pages I opened remembered my ID and I had immediate access to use the sites, others didn’t at first, but after logging in work fine.

I wont fully revisit the whole is Mahalo a great service debate here other than to say that someone once described Mahalo to me as search for the mentally challenged (well he used another word, use your imagination). I’ve always thought that was a little unfair, it’s perhaps search for the Google and/ or Boolean illiterate (so I’m not the target market), but there is value there for the general consumer market. I’m not about to switch to using Mahalo for search tomorrow and I’d expect most of you reading this wont, but ignore the search and take a look at Mahalo Multiprofiles.

It’s well implemented, handy, and its something I can see myself using. We still aren’t at the ultimate point of proper social networking aggregation yet (see Google Socialstream for how it will eventually work) but in the mean time Mahalo Multiprofiles may well find favor among the many who struggle to keep up with their ever growing number of social network sites.

On a related note, I cant help that wonder exactly in which direction Mahalo is heading. Mahalo offers a social networking platform that now does aggregation, and on the search side it’s starting to look more and more like Weblogs Inc than a search engine, check out the Celebrity Gossip pages as an example: that’s not search results, that looks and smells like content generation to me. Calacanis has always been good a building multiple traffic streams so it’s probably part of that strategy, but at the current rate Mahalo wont primarily be a search tool by the end of 2008.

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Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results. Jimmy was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.

Perhaps the most interesting moment, however, was when Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who didn’t attend, has a good basic transcript of the session (proving to me once again that it is often easier to cover a conference remotely instead of batting crowds and dealing with terrible Internet coverage). I was able to take some video of a couple of interesting segments, though, embedded below.

In the first segment Wales gives the audience his overview of Wikia Search, and Calacanis jumps in with a few observations as well. The second is Marissa’s comment on what she sees as a false dichotomy – Google Page Rank, she notes, is based on real humans linking to sites on the web. Listening to her felt like a cold shower after a night of heavy partying.

As an aside, the DLD conference is clearly one of the better events I’ve attended in the last few months.

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Too lazy to watch the entire Stevenote video stream on CrunchGear, or read Duncan’s real time notes from the event? No worries. Mahalo’s Veronica Belmont distills all the important stuff down into just sixty seconds.

See all of our coverage from Macworld here and at CrunchGear.

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Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team.

The company is still deep in stealth and, apparently, working out of a garage in true startup style (see image below). The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys.

Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search (he’s not a fan of PageRank though:“PageRank wrecked the web. Google is the cause of all of this. and Google is going down with it.”). He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself. Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009.

Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored. In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning. This will be a company to watch, and speculate on, in 2008.

There are other promising search startups out there. Powerset, Cuill (we’ll be hearing more about them soon) and the upcoming Wikia Search Engine are all yet to launch. Mahalo is growing fast (but still tiny). Can anyone unseat Google? Perhaps not any time soon. But you don’t have to get much market share to be a huge winner in this space – every 1%, they say, is worth a cool billion dollars.

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“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

A lot has happened since that announcement. Mahalo, a Sequoia backed startup with their own approach to human powered search results, launched in May and is showing promising early growth. Meanwhile Google, perhaps somewhat annoyed by Wikia Search as well as Wikipedia’s ongoing refusal to add Google ads to their pages, announced Knol earlier this month – clearly a shot across the Wikipedia bow.

Not much on Wikia search, however. They’ve set up a page to discuss the project. In July Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, which had technology to allow distributed web crawling by users. And an early screen shot, showing a Facebook-like profile page, was shown in South Africa in November.

Wikia Search In 2007 Or Not? Jimmy Wales Say Yes.

But the promise has been to launch Wikia Search this year, and time is fast running out. There’s just one week left in 2007.

Today a report was published that Wales, in an IRC chat, promised to make the end-of-year launch date: “ the search engine *will* launch before the end of the year, probably in private beta first, and then open to the public in early january. No specific dates are certain yet. But sooon.”

I asked Wikia CEO Gil Penchina if the quote was accurate and whether to expect a launch in the next few days. His response was “Can’t comment on exact timing.”

It won’t be important a year from now if Wikia Search launches this year or early next year. But it is time for the product to be judged on the merits of the search results created by it, not on a series of press leaks and hazy screen shots. I look forward to the launch, whether it be this year or (hopefully at the latest) next.

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