mahalo Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

As always my plans to spend a weekend dedicated to catching up, and even getting ahead, on my blogging etc seem to have been destroyed before Friday is even over, thanks to a horrible noise from the exhaust on my car. I guess that’s what you get for buying something cheap and unusual!

And that clumsily links into the amount of change that’s occurring at the moment to major sites:

New look Facebook has been talked about a lot, and it’s now available. And to be honest, I’m really undecided about the design. It certainly makes it more blog/lifestream than profile page, and it moves applications out of the way, which is good for dealing with application addicts. I’m surprised the advertising is moved out to a column where it is easier to ignore over time, although it did catch my eye the first time it logged.

And there’s new look Delicious. Notice the lack of del.icio.us, as it’s now become www.delicious.com, as they were seeing all sorts of versions of the name being used. A bit of a shame in some ways, as it was one major way to stand out from the crowd. Ma.gnolia might feel a bit silly now! Again the design is cleaner and more modern, and a little lifestream-esque.

And you may have heard the tiniest of whispers around the web that tiny new startup Google is being challenged by a new search engine called Cuil, which claims to index more pages than Google, and return more linked results. One interesting ploy is that they promise information for each search will be anonymous – fine in theory but what will happen in the event of a court case? At the moment, returns a bit flakey, like this one for Dan Thornton. But I’m going to give it some time before making a judgement – I was initially unimpressed with Mahalo, but I’ve grown to like it more and more as time goes by. The best thing about Mahalo’s human-powered search is that the official plugin allows you to display an information box alongside your Google results – meaning it can save you a few clicks if you’re researching something which is covered.

And rounding off a pretty quick skim, is the news for social media marketing, research and business people that Forrester has bought Jupiter Research, which is pretty big news in that space.

Now if I can just stop the exhaust falling off the car, I might be able to catch up with a few things.

I’ve had several conversations about user generated content with my colleague and fellow blogger David Cushman (and you can read his take here.)

Any online submission or rating system needs to have some reward to make the time invested worthwhile. And most of the current models use recognition as that reward, including Digg and Del.icio.us.

But the idea of payment is most definitely spreading. For a while bloggers could monetise their work either with advertising on their site – or by submitting articles to sites like Blogburst. Or even by writing content for sites like Helium.

But the options are growing every day. (Note, I’m not vouching for the earning potential, or payments from any of the sites in this post)

You could earn by using a social network like Yuwie.

Or you could submit links and comments to social review aggregator (and Digg clone), Ximmy.

Or by submitting videos to the likes of Revver.

Or you could even submit pages of search returns for Mahalo.

What’s interesting is how these sites will fair, and how the payment system evolves. Is payment enough to tempt enough users to make Yuwie or Ximmy a viable alternative? Because currently the payment system is definitely aimed at keeping payments as an optional bonus rather than a viable reason to justify the time involved.

Mahalo, meanwhile, takes a more valuable view of the content provided – as it should if it will challenge the likes of the Google search algorithm. Whereas Yuwie or Ximmy offer miniscule amounts for micro actions, Mahalo pays a huge amount, by comparison. But it also expects a lot more work, and applies a rigorous judging procedure.

But the main risk I can see for any of these new business is that their success could easily pave the way for competitors to attack them in a simple price war. And that could lead to a lot of false promises and unmade payments until finally the payment equilibrium puts a fair market price of user submissions, participation, and content.

That’s why I wouldn’t advise anyone to build a system around payment alone. But increasingly payment is becoming an expected part of participation and has to be factored into any social plan. The only variable is whether 1000 links to articles is worth $10 of my time for Ximmy – or a page of researched and picked search returns is worth $10 of my time on Mahalo!

This is just the start of my research into the online user economy, and economics isn’t my main skill, so I’d be really interested in opinions, comments, and anyone’s experiences with using paid UGC sites of any type…

(For the record, I’ve signed up with almost every site mentioned, but I’m still working towards any actual payments!)