The Slakinski Log

Dave Winer creator of all things good (RSS, OPML) is moving closer to the final spec for OPML 2.0 and has just released some comments based on feedback the OPML Community has been giving! Its great to watch this as it all unfolds.

Mahalo’s very own Veronica Belmont is interviewed on one of my fav webvids Jet Set Show! Check it out!

One of Mahalo’s formats is OPML which gives us some interesting tools right out of the box since OPML already has a great community of developers working on cool stuff that supports the format. One of those cool things is a OPML browser called Grazr. See below for a little Grazr widget that shows Mahalo’s data for my home and native land Canada

I’m scarred for life, so now I have to scar everyone else by spreading this video around

Check out this cool behind the scenes vid at Mahalo that Fast Company made! (see article here as well)

Jason Scott is an amazing person, his goal in life is to take our memories of the computer age gone by and tell people about it, more importantly let other people talk about it.

You might know him as the guy who did the BBS Documentary and is now working on Get Lamp a documentary about the people who worked on and played text adventure games! Check out the trailer here or watch it below. Note: The trailer was made last year, but only just posted to youtube.

I’ve urged Jason a few times to make a podcast documentary which he may do one day… I think the story of how it was born is an interesting one that should be told, but would anyone watch it? I know I would

We’ve started to release parts of our source to the community. We’re opening the doors with a parser function for MediaWiki…Imagelink.

Imagelink will allow you to make a link out of an internal image - to either an external URL or an internal page name. By default, MediaWiki will link images back to the Image page itself, rather than a URL. The common work-around is to use a #REDIRECT on the image page, but then you can only have an Image link to one URL and it has to be internal. This extension provides a method for linking the same image to multiple external or internal links.

We have to give a big thank you to Jim R. Wison for his work on this particular code and getting it ready for public use!

Learn more up at this projects Google Code page.

Jason just installed MT4 and with it I switched out my template, the last one was up there for about 3 years so it was time for a change! Let me know if you see anything wrong with the site.

So we got a lot of feedback when we launched Mahalo, and a lot of people were asking to join in on the fun. So we made that happen for you! Come to our greenhouse and you too can write search result pages for us, and even get paid for your fine work! More here, here, and here

So mahalo.com is live! As announced at D Conference by Jason Calacanis only moments ago! yes this is the project I’ve been working on since the New Year and I’m so glad its finally out there. I also am working with the best set of coders out there, Sean Jackson and Chris Miller

From the press prelease:

Human-powered search engine Mahalo.com launches with investors including Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, Newscorp, CBS and Burda Media.

Wall Street Journal’s D Conference (Northern San Diego), May 30th, 2007: Serial entrepreneur Jason McCabe Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine, at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference. The site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet’s 4,000 most popular search terms completed. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.

“We’re in month five of a five-year project,” explained Calacanis, “but we wanted to get some real-world feedback, so we’re launching it early here at D Conference.”

The site is focused on the top English-language search terms, including verticals such as travel, products, news, entertainment, sports, food, and health. “Google’s mission is to index the world’s information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index,” said Calacanis. “It’s my belief that humans can play a significant role in the development of search results and we’re going to try to figure out exactly what that role is over the next couple of years. I am really looking forward to hearing what people think of the Alpha,” he added.

..Additionally, the firm announced that it has closed two rounds of financing to date. Lead investors include Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk and NewsCorp. Additional investors include CBS, Hubert Burda Media, Allen & Co., David Bradley, Gigi Brisson, Sandy Climan, Mark Cuban, Matt Coffin, Ted Leonsis, Jonathan Miller, Mark Pincus, Ryan Scott, and Fred Wilson.