3 Z's
(and the three *berg's, too... Crashed the 4th wall during SNL opening.)
thesethings (andy) // @thesethings
portland, oregon
lately: #datascraping #bash #python #design #fun #delight #twitter #tumblr #screencasts
(and the three *berg's, too... Crashed the 4th wall during SNL opening.)
Jason Calacanis just gave a fun, very forthcoming overview of the history of Mahalo before describing its new mission: teaching stuff.
While he expressed much inspiration/ admiration for the academic Khan academy, and Mahalo does cover similar topics, the new Mahalo is also influenced by the domestic/DIY YouTube "tutorial" explosion. (This is an under-hyped area of YouTube, but it is huge and awesome. 15 year olds giving Windows 7 tutorials, grandpas doing plumbing how-to's... amateur but very organized, threaded, and rated..and awesome.)
So... Mahalo 4.0 is a cocktail of two super cool things... a great idea.
(Full disclosure: I am really rooting for this stuff.)
But after checking it out, I found the topic (how-to) pages disorienting: there are too many editorial voices (probably all fine on their own.) and disjointed bits of content.
I'm not opposed to the idea of content from multiple parties on a single page... but when the YouTube video is made by one crazy voice, and the Mahalo outline copy is in another, and neither of them contextualize the other... there's no continuity. There were also lots of random boxes off to the side with totally non-sequitur pattern-match tweets and search results.
"Design" means a lot of things... and the new Mahalo is by no means ugly- it looks great. But the content just does not flow. I can tell Mahalo makes cool videos... but it just makes we wanna subscribe to their YouTube channel instead of read their pages. Which is too bad, coz there's lots of custom-crafted text that just gets overwhelmed by everything going on. There's also some nice web nav action going on... keyboard command navigation, very nice editors, lots of controls without having to login (good job, web engs!).
All in all: I'm not giving up on them, and will check-in a lot. But I'm not excited to browse the content on Mahalo.com (as opposed to their YouTube.)
OH on HN about the Freakonomics blog leaving the New York Times:
If your economics correspondent reckons there is more money to be made by not being in your newspaper then you have to start thinking about your business model.
In any case, it saves group/corporate brands a few characters. (An ad-hoc hack corporate accounts often use is signing tweets with initials like "^SP" inside tweets).
I wonder how long this has been supported by the API. I just don't see it used, even by group clients like CoTweet and Hootsuite.
I recently ran two really similar Google queries.
One brought up structured research paper results amongst, but distilled from regular web results. (Google calls these research papers "Google Scholar.")
One didn't.
Google has long included research intermingled with results, but I dug this structured separation, and want to trip this at will.
The research results are from Google Scholar, which you can search directly but exclusively. I'm looking for a Google page where I can search both the general web and scholarly papers in one search with distilled results like above, but on my command, instead of just when Google feels like it.
