gavinpurcell.com

I tend to have a pretty wide, top-down view of the web, catching little parts of a lot of new things. This is thanks in part to my job, in part to my side projects and in part to my general curiosity about stuff at large.

I also tend to have very fleeting relationships with sites other than blogs, mostly due to attention deficiency. Blogs (like newspapers & magazines) employ content creators to write & organize new material. That alone can generally keep me interested, especially if they focus on a subject I care about. However, most new sites (web 2.0 types) are webtools of some sort and unless I’ve got a dire need for their tool (which I generally don’t) I stop visiting after the initial sign-up.

That said, there are two interesting start-ups that I think interestingly meld the two things (blogs + webtools) and I think cover very similar ground, although I’m relatively sure both companies would feel awkward about being compared to one another.

First, is BuzzFeed which bills itself as a way to ‘Find Your Favorite New Thing’. BuzzFeed uses both an algorithm and editors to see what’s making news or (more likely) making cool out there in the blogosphere. As someone who sees a lot of net stuff very quickly, I find that I’m often beating it to the punch in terms of discovery, but it does a fantastic job of following up on important subjects (such as the now proven-fake Meg White sex tape) by providing links per subject. Even better it has a tendency to do a lot of this quickly, which can help from a research stand point.

On the other hand is Mahalo, Jason Calacanis‘ people-powered search engine which provides detailed, editorial driven search results for some of the most popular topics on the web. Mahalo Guides, those people who edit the individual pages, do a pretty good job of grabbing links & content that (mostly) does a better job than Google at providing relevant links. It seems that lately Mahalo has been focusing more on trying to provide expert-based pages on both breaking content (like news or media phenomenons) and how-to stuff.

Which is where I begin to see a cross over between the two services and perhaps an advantage towards BuzzFeed, at least for me. BuzzFeed seems to be doing a much better job of providing not only detailed info on stories that are important to me. I go back there a lot and really pay attention when it appears in my Feed.

How do they know what’s important to me? They probably don’t. But most likely, I’m much more like those people (that is, the people who edit BuzzFeed) than I am like everybody (or the potential audience for Mahalo).

I think that this might be Mahalo’s fatal flaw. While I find myself understanding the idea for a people-powered search engine, I’m not sure if going wide is ever the way that this is going to work. However, perhaps if there were mini-Mahalos, smaller search sites with focus (either narrow based on topic or wide based on personality) it might work better?

All I know is that I’ve yet to find the reason to return to Mahalo. It’s not delivering me an experience that causes me to want to return. I’ll keep trying as I think it’s an interesting idea and I’d really like to see it succeed.