There's competition for Google's Knol, and then there's Mahalo

Google Knol may or may not ever come to fruition, but Hitwise was kind enough to put together this chart of its potential rivals in the market for websites which answer your questions. And yes, Jason Calacanis's Mahalo is on there. You have to squint. It's way, way, way down there at the bottom. That little sliver of green. No wonder Calacanis is always commenting here with a link to the site. Think he'll do it again on this post? More »

At Mixx, Seth Godin pimps Squidoo

NEW YORK CITY — I'm at the Mixx 2007 online-advertising conference here, marveling at the brazenness of author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. "How do we use this medium in the way it wants to be used?" he asks, as he's interviewed by Charlie Rose. He's speaking, of course, about the Web, but he might as well be talking about the medium of the conference stage. And he's using it to promote his new website, Squidoo. Squidoo, as best as I can tell, is sort of a blog-hosting service like Google's blogger, sort of a social-bookmarking service like Yahoo's Del.icio.us, and sort of a hand-compiled search-results aggregator like Mahalo. Godin, of course, doesn't miss the opportunity to brag to Rose and the audience that Squidoo's Web traffic is larger than the Wall Street Journal's, without the benefit of any advertising. Except, of course, the kind of free advertising you get by being a best-selling author and getting invited to speak at conferences.

Jason Calacanis v. Seth Godin: Porn is evil

Jason Calacanis' target for today is Seth Godin's Squidoo. Whether or not Squidoo is being gamed by search engine optimizers (SEOs), the puritanical founder of the human search engine Mahalo has a problem with porn. Apparently porn has no place on the web, and search tools should not index the dirty, dirty content. Or is Calacanis just upset that a search on Mahalo for "xxx" results in entries for the Dallas Cowboys, Michael Irvin, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Vin Diesel, and "porn" yields entries for churros, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, Jenna Jameson, and Tera Patrick? If Squidoo is being gamed by SEOs, maybe Mahalo could use a little gaming to shore up the relevancy of these presumably popular search terms.