Sample the Web

You can now add FriendFeed to Your Mahalo Profile. What’s FriendFeed, you ask? It’s the place to have meaningful online conversations.

Begin side rant: The place to have meaningful online conversations used to be Twitter, but since Twitter is never up anymore and doesn’t have threaded comments, the discussion is starting to die over there. Twitter is still totally useful for microblogging and populating the sidebar of my blog, but it’s not where I’m having meaningful conversations anymore. The lack of a working reply function for close to a week broke that entirely for me and a lot of other people. ///rant off

However, the good news is that you can still follow peoples’ Twitters in FriendFeed and you can now follow both of them via your Mahalo profile page (along with a lot of other services) , should you so choose. And if you do, you can add me as a friend on Mahalo here, you can follow me on Twitter here, and you can subscribe to my FriendFeed here. Also, if you like what we’re doing at Mahalo and you use FriendFeed, make sure you join the Mahalo room.

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Jason has a big announcement about our new features today on his blog and there’s a nice discussion going on over on this FriendFeed thread. Thomas Hawk, for example, made this Thomas Hawk page on Mahalo. We helped him fix the capitalization of his last name and I added the picture for him, but he initiated building the page without having to log in to Mahalo or create any sort of account with us.

Basically, today we made it where anyone can create a page on Mahalo and anyone can edit any Guide Note on Mahalo. Our staff is watching the edits, of course, to protect against spamming or abuse, as well as to fact check any information added, but we’re looking forward to seeing what cool things people start creating on the site. Let us know what you think and if there’s anything you’d like to see improved with these new features.

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Mark Jeffrey, Mahalo’s CTO, just posted this position on his blog:

Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world’s #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), Mark Cuban and others. This kind of opportunity is **extremely rare** in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.

We are looking for a Designer who can create clean, innovative, tasteful, lightweight designs. We need a fulltime, in-house designer to define the look and feel of many upcoming enhancements to the Mahalo.com website.

You should ‘get’ Web 2.0 — Facebook, Twitter, etc. You understand user interface design for the Net. Of course, you should be artistic and blow us away with your graphics. We’re looking for someone whose aesthetic sensibility is similar to this: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/

Rudimentary CSS / HTML knowledge required (you should be able to create a skeleton of your design — but don’t worry: we have developers who will program the javascript, database calls, etc.)

What we’re NOT looking for: monster flash splash screens, screens that fade in and out, tons of animation, print or television-style graphics.

If you’re world-class Designer looking for a very visible position in a world-class Web 2.0 company, then we’re looking for you. Please send us a resume + portfolio asap to Mark (at) Mahalo.com

NO OFFSHORE!  NO RECRUITERS!

We want ninjas. If you’re a ninja in LA, make sure you let Mark know.

Also, if you’re a writer looking for work, we’re still looking for some great writers on the editorial team, so get in touch with me: ck at mahalo dot com

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…and still find time to arrange some flowers!

We’ve got some great new How Tos at Mahalo. Here’s a nice sampling of recent additions:
How to Poach Chicken
How to Make Spring Rolls
How to Make a Toga
How to Make Friends Online
How to Make Bread Pudding
How to Buy a Timeshare
How to Make a White Russian
How to Write a Check
How to Speak Russian
How to Make a Sex on the Beach 
How to Make a Long Island Iced Tea
How to Make Potato Salad
How to Make Egg Salad
How to Bleach Hair
How to Write a Children’s Book
How to Become a Substitute Teacher
How to Make Iced Coffee
How to Write a Love Poem
How to Arrange Flowers

If you’re a freelance writer interested in building some how to articles for us, please check out the How to Group’s Most Wanted List in the Mahalo Greenhouse.

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I may not be able to play the game on my Macbook because of my graphics card, but the Video Game Team from Mahalo is taking a small break from building out our Metal Gear Solid 4 Walkthrough to play Spore Creature Creator. You can watch the live stream of Spore Creature Creator gameplay here:
UPDATE: They’ll continue streaming live tomorrow when we have the full version of the game, but for now, here’s the video of what they did stream today:
Free .TV show from Ustream
They’re also working on a FAQ for Spore Creature Creator, so check it out.

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Mahalo’s developers have put together a Mahalo module using Yahoo’s new SearchMonkey platform, and Julia put together a nice how to explaining it here: How to Use Mahalo-Enhanced Yahoo Search. You don’t have to download anything to add Mahalo to your Yahoo results, you just have to be logged in to your Yahoo! account, go to the Mahalo page in Yahoo!’s Search Gallery and click the Add Enhanced Results button. The next time you search for something on Yahoo and a Mahalo page comes up, there will be a little expandable box with more information, as in the following search for Metal Gear Solid 4 Cheats:

Check it out.

Jason and Mark also blogged about this.

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The video game team at Mahalo is playing the game right now, check it out: Metal Gear Solid 4 Live Stream - Mahalo:

We’re also writing up our Metal Gear Solid 4 Walkthrough live.

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Check it out, today’s Mahalo Daily features The Simpson’s Ride at Universal Studios:

It looks like they got a better tour than Kristin and I did when we covered the premiere for TV Squad.

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Creative Commons image courtesy of by Akiraman
The Mahalo Video Game team is preparing for Metal Gear Solid 4. They’re grabbing the game at midnight tonight and will begin playing the game and live streaming it on Mahalo. They’ll also be noting any Metal Gear Solid 4 Cheats and building a full walkthrough of Metal Gear Solid 4. For more information about the game, make sure you watch our Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots category.

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We’re hiring freelance, work-from-home writers at $10 an hour for Mahalo. If you’re interested, send me an email at ck at mahalo dot com

Here’s the details:

Mahalo is looking for $10 an hour freelance, work-from-home writers to help us build excellent search result pages. Candidates must be excellent writers capable of writing perfect copy at a fast pace. Familiarity with online research, journalism, and wiki markup language are all definite pluses.

Mahalo is a human-powered search engine dedicated to delivering carefully curated search results featuring the highest quality, spam-free links available, alongside helpful and informative Guide Notes and Fast Facts about these search terms. Our motto is ”We’re here to help.”

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Mahalo Daily today put together an abridged version of yesterday’s keynote. You can watch the video and find some related reading here: Steve Jobs WWDC Keynote in 60 Seconds - Mahalo.

Or you can watch the video here:

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We announced our new co-host of Mahalo Daily today:

I give away the actual winner after the break.
(more…)

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Big announcement coming up tomorrow as Mahalo chooses the next host of Mahalo.

Here’s what the celebrities at the Guys Choice Awards by Spike TV had to say:

Here’s the two finalists’ (Andrea Rene and Leah D’Emilio) viral videos:

Girl Trains for Guitar Hero

and

Touch My Body Parody Video

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We’ve got a copy of Ninja Gaiden 2 and the Video Game Team is going to be playing it and putting together pages associated with it. You can watch them doing it all live on our Ninja Gaiden 2 Live Stream page or embedded here:

Also, if you have the game and you’re having difficulty, you’ll want to check out Ninja Gaiden 2 Cheats and Ninja Gaiden 2 Walkthrough, which we’ll be updating as we play through the game.

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Chris Anderson from Wired and author of The Long Tail and the upcoming Free! came by Mahalo HQ today and talked to us about the economy of free. Very interesting.

Here’s Part One of the talk:
Broadcast by Ustream.TV

And here’s part two:
Live Videos provided by Ustream.TV

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Our How To category over at Mahalo is becoming a great resource and I’d love to hear what other people think of it.

We have a wide range of topics covered. I would have loved access to our financial how to articles back when I was in college. Wondering how to get a car loan? What about how to consolidate student loans or how to get out of debt? I myself need to learn how to track stocks and how to buy stocks. My stock market experience is limited to 401Ks and small bits of stock I’ve received from former employers.

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Mahalo is looking for a Systems Engineer, Los Angeles. It’s a great team. If you’re looking to do something great online, you’re a coding ninja, and you’re in LA, you should apply for this:

Systems Engineer, Los Angeles
Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world’s #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), and others. This kind of opportunity is extremely rare in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.

We’re looking for a seasoned Systems Engineer. You should be expert in massively scalable architectures, how MySQL and Linux interact, how MySQL and memcache interact, sharding, replication (including multiple
master replication) and how to tune MySQL based on various schemas for maximum performance and availability. You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter
with the “general get it factor”. You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.

You should be expert with:
Applications: PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.x, memcache 1.2.x
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, Unicast and Multicast socket programming
Scripting languages: Unix shell scripting
Other languages: Applicants with C, Java, and Objective-C experience preferred
Bonus: Hadoop / HBase, Lucene, Nutch, Spread

Well rounded candidates such as release engineers with a background in both large corporate environments and small startups have an edge.

More info over at Jason’s post: Systems Engineer, Los Angeles.

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We now have all the missions complete on our GTA4 Walkthrough page, so if you’re getting ready for a weekend full of GTA4 madness, make sure you check out that page if you get stuck, and our GTA4 Cheats page if you’re looking for some mayhem.

Better yet, if in the process of completing a mission, you figure out a better way than what we have in our walkthrough, let us know via the GTA4 Walkthrough Message Board and we’ll add it to the page and give you credit, just like we did for this tip from Alex Read:

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Last night, I was watching Eliot Phillips play GTA4 on my PS3. He was just going through all the missions one at a time and we didn’t see the money tally or anything like that and he was having trouble finding weapons, so I was starting to think that they had stripped the game of all the things that made the previous version awesome. However, I took the controller and played for about 30 minutes. Mugged someone and got some money off of them first thing. Cha-ching. Then I tried to go for an absolutely absurd killing spree, which has always been my favorite thing to do with the Grand Theft Auto games. That and trying to get the main character killed in creative ways.

Things I’ve discovered: you cannot wreck a motorcycle as easily as you used to be able to in previous versions of the game. You basically have to ram the motorcycle full speed into an on-coming car to achieve flight. However, when you do achieve flight, it’s pretty awesome. Also, I managed two wrecks where Niko got totally thrown from the car, flying out of the window. Very cinematic.

As I was playing, Eliot looked up Mahalo’s GTA 4 Cheats page and we entered in this code using the cellphone:

Spawn Annihilator: 3595550100

This spawns a big helicopter. Unfortunately, we spawned the thing right next to some trees so when I tried to take off, the blades hit into the tree trunk and broke off and the copter died. Then cops came up and shot me as I tried to punch them. C’est la vie.

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If you’re getting GTA 4, make sure you bookmark Grand Theft Auto 4 Walkthrough. The full walkthrough is being built live and should be done by tonight at midnight (but beware that the live stream is already at the last group of missions, so spoilers abound if you dare to click over and watch the live stream). Jason blogs about all this action over on his blog, so check it out.
Watch live video from Grand Theft Auto IV LIVE on Justin.tv
Also, we have an impressive list of GTA4 Cheats in case you’re all about getting a tank and wrecking havoc.

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