I found this arrangement in my feed reader mildly amusing this morning: Fred Wilson's post on Mahalo.com directly above a post by Brad Feld entitled "The Computer Should Be Doing the Work for Us". (They are unrelated entries).

Mahalo.com is, of course, a people-powered search engine that Jason Calacanis publicly unveiled yesterday (no longer "Project X"). I'll be honest: when I first saw that Jason announced a "people-powered search engine", I was underwhelmed. But the more I think about it, he may really be on to something.

If you listen to CalacanisCast or read his blog, you'll know Jason has more than a slight obsession with Wikipedia. I'm certainly not the only one who noticed that Mahalo pages resemble Wikipedia entries more than they do Google results. And according to Dan Farber:

Calacanis compared Mahalo to Wikipedia, which he said sucked in the first few years and then took off in year four or five. In the first few years, Mahalo will get to 25,000 search terms and then go into maintenance mode, he said. “We can help to dictate good behavior on the Web,” Calacanis added, citing sites with spam that would not be selected by editors for inclusion in the directory pages.

Jason says he wants to "combine Wikipedia, Weblogs Inc, and Google". Each of these models have their pros and cons. An algorithm-driven site like Google is going to scale relatively easily and cheaply but is always going to face people trying to game the system. An open-source community like Wikipedia (or say Digg) takes care of a lot of those spam problems, but the network effect can be very difficult to achieve and (especially in the beginning) may suffer from quality issues. A paid editorial staff such as Weblogs Inc. or Mahalo will address both the spam and difficulty of seeding the community, but quite simply will never scale close to levels achievable with the first two.

With Netscape, Jason combined a Digg-style community with editorial oversight. This strikes me as the next evolution of that model, applying it to a broader problem than just news. In other words, it probably isn't a coincidence that C.K. Sample, the former managing editor and then director of Netscape, is now the chief editor at Mahalo.

It's an ambitious undertaking, but the successful combination of an algorithmic search engine with crowdsourcing and editorial oversight would be revolutionary indeed. It will be interesting to see what happens here - I'll certainly be watching closely.

Jelly, the twice-monthly coworking session Luke and I started at House 2.0 over a year ago, was recently mentioned in an article about coworking in the New York Post! (See also: Jelly on the Freelancer’s Union Blog)

Thanks to Kiera Butler for including us in her story.

Anyone is welcome to join us at Jelly. Check out www.workatjelly.com to learn more and email me to get on the list.

(photo credit: coworking brooklyn)

Congrats to Coworking Brooklyn, Jelly NYC, 3rdward, and cafeBricolage for getting this story in the NY Post today.

This is great news for folks interested in the coworking movement, coworking spaces, and parallel projects such as cafeBricoalge and Jelly: the more people who are aware of these options and these types of working conditions, the more demand will exist and the more resources we can throw at these projects.

Here are a few key quotes from the article:

After a little research, Winard found Coworking Brooklyn, a group that meets in a Williamsburg gallery and events space called The Change You Want To See. He hit it off with the other workers, and found he could get more done there than at home. He started coming in two days a week; then after a month, his employer agreed to pay the $200 monthly fee so he could work at Coworking Brooklyn full-time.

and

The Coworking New York City wiki links to three spaces that are up and running - Coworking Brooklyn and 3rdward in Williamsburg and Jelly in Manhattan - and several more that are in the works. Among the latter is Café Bricolage, a café-cum-coworking space which will serve as an “incubator for start-ups.” While it’s not up and running yet, it already has its own Web site, blog, and Google group, where interested parties are debating the best ways to get the space off the ground.

The Shirtless Apprentice makes his internet debut today with the launch of a bi-monthly instructional podcast about video podcast production. Self-titled as The Shirtless Apprentice, this concise video podcast walks through the various decisions and video production techniques required for producing a high quality video podcast. In Episode 1, Matt the Shirtless Apprentice reviews the Sony PD-150, Panasonic AG-DVX100, JVC GY-HD110U and Panasonic AG-HVX200 and then selects his favorite. For Your Imagination has planned three episodes of this NYC based production for release with more to come based upon the success of the pilot episodes. So head on over to www.shirtlessapprentice.com and let Matt know what you think!

This past weekend I was pleased to attend the Personal Democracy Forum, hosted by PersonalDemocracy.com and TechPresident.com, and sponsored by Google, among others.

I’d like to declare the PdF and its adjoining unConference a success! On a personal level, I enjoyed myself thoroughly and stayed for every minute, both days. I want to thank the conference organizers, especially Josh Levy, for the wonderful time, and a big thank you to Google for the Google Scholarship which payed my way to the conference.

Here are some of the reasons I loved the conference:

A Melody of Tech and Politics Expertise
Nothing’s worse than a conference of homogeny. The difference between a good conference and a good networking session is that at a conference you learn stuff, and you can’t learn stuff from people just like you.

PdF was all about technology’s role in politics, so the spectrum of folks attending was already stacked for the better. I have background in both, now, and would consider my humble expertise to lie somewhere in the middle of the two (”user engagement in new media with a business strategy?”), so I was surrounded by more niche experts on all sides.

One of the best illustrations of this was towards the end of the unConference, when I introduced my college buddy Andrew Slack to my new tech buddy Tara Hunt. Here were two people, incredibly experienced at engaging folks online, and experts in their fields; and they didn’t know a thing about the other and what the other did (though, ironically, both had been hired by Mozes at one point). Watching them interact and exchange ideas was a lot of fun.

On a less personal note, conference sessions were led by folks mostly “known” in the politics side of things, and the closing panel on Friday was a great peek into the inner-workings of ‘08 presidential campaigns. My complaint here was that discussion was slightly too-inside-baseball and didn’t focus on the technological at all. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the balance and highlights included Scott Heiferman’s demo of Meetup, and I was stuck by his reflections on everything he learned since the ‘04 elections when Meetup first blew-up. His best quote was “The Revolution Will Not Be on YouTube” and I really loved his notion that fundamental, important changes would still happen when real people meet face to face and work together.

Conference Stars: Good Cool-to-Tool Ratio
You definitely want “star power” at a conference, but you don’t want the too-good-for-you rock-stars or the “tools.” The PdF had many stars in attendance, and they were mostly the cool ones. Craig Newmark had to be the one with the best star-to-cool ratio, seeing that I was in the bathroom line twice with him (something he pointed out was “almost romantic,” and then joked that he can’t kid like that in SF). Craig was most visible browsing the halls and attending sessions “just like the rest of us.” At the end of the day mixer, I saw him wandering around poking his head into conversations, not just waiting for the “little people” like me to say hello.

The “tools” of the conference were mostly political and tech bloggers who haven’t really done that much incredible, other than amass a large readership on the web due to inflammatory writings, or over-inflated attributions in the development of web technology. It’s a real shame these folks think they’re important, because it definitely got in the way at one session in particular about Race and Identity. A number of bloggers in the crowd dominated, and I felt like shouting, “Hey professional bloggers! I don’t care about your inside baseball! I want a real discussion that’s not about you!”

The unConference was Super Sweet
Saturday’s unConference (a BarCamp, of sorts) was a blast. The sessions ranged from “How to get 2 million views on your YouTube video” (hosted by my friend Andrew Slack) to “Bringing your Online Movement Offline.” In true unConference style, two areas were set-up in ad-hoc fashion to support additional sessions. Networking was un-frantic yet plentiful, and my best connections were made on this day.

Lastly, I love that this conference was in New York City. Tech has its center in other parts of the Country, and politics certainly has its own capital, but the two combined have a wonderful home in this City.

If you want to read more coverage of the PdF, visit these links:

• Thomas Friedman and Eric Schmidt Talk, coverage from ClickZ
• Steve Garfield’s Videos of PdF
• 2008 Web Video Odyssey
• Google Blog Search of “Personal Democracy Forum”

nextMadisonAve: A Community Conversation about what the digital advertising world will look like when the up and coming young professionals become the decision makers and technology leaders of tomorrow. Speakers included Greg Verdino, VP/Emerging Channels at DIGITAS LLC., Michael Hurt, Director of Ad Product Planning and Strategy at Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, Michael Leo, CEO, Operative; Co-founder, Avenue A, Todd Thiessen, VP, Strategy, Avenue A | Razorfish and Larry Allen, SVP, Marketing & Business Development, Tacoda. The event was held on May 9th, 2007 at the studios of For Your Imagination in New York City.

Over the weekend, it was reported that online video production company (and NYC headquartered) Black20 received funding from Jeff Jarvis (about). Immediately following the story it was announced that Mogulus (another NYC company) got a hefty $1.2 million from angel investors (hefty because angel groups tend to finance rounds of $250k - $750k).

Is NYC ready for an online video boom? That’s the feeling in the air at this year’s Streaming Media East, going on at the New York Hilton.

Of course NYC already had a bunch of online video start-ups, including Blip.tv, Roo, Motionbox, Vimeo and WallStrip (which is evidently going to be bought by CBS); and this all makes a lot of sense, seeing that some of the world’s biggest media companies are headquartered right here in the Big Apple (NBC, ABC, CBS, MTV, etc). Furthermore, the fueling-stations for the web video blaze (I’m talking about Madison Avenue) are located in NYC, and these folks are unmistakably thinking about these issues.

So if web video is going to be “The Future of Everything” (the title of an upcoming blog post), is NYC going to be at the center of that future?

Maybe video is Silicon Alley 2.0