Jasan Calacanis blogs:
"Today I'm thrilled to announce the Mahalo Greenhouse, a place where the public can build search results that-if accepted by our Guides-will be included in the Mahalo search index."Mahalo, the people powered search is saying that they realize that for Mahalo to work, they need to have a vast pool of expertise contributing to the effort and they are asking for your help. It's hard to say whether internet searchers will embrace Mahalo, but it is certain that Calacanis is making all the right moves to give this site it's best possible chance.
He started with a small core of good looking pages and now he is asking large groups of people to begin adding to the pool. In exchange he is willing to offer page creators a few bucks ($5 - $10) per finished and accepted page as well as credits for having created the page. He's got $250,000 set aside to make the payments as well as a very creative side deal that allows those who don't want his money to have his effort benefit the Wikipedia Foundation. It's genius.
If Calacanis pays an average of $7 per page, then his "quarter mill" buys him 35,714 pages over the next year. He previously set the goal of having $10,000 pages by the end of the year. With the bounty having been set, I think the goal is well in hand. What's more, by offering author's credits on the newly created pages, he can be assured that Mahalo will garner inbound links to pages by the various authors (Part Time Guides) involved. I see LinkedIn, FaceBook, Digg, and MySpace pages pointing to the newly created pages as samples of work. Mahalo gets lots of pages and lots of links in one simple program. I think Jason may be on to something.
