While community managing (moderating) over at Mahalo Answers I spend a lot of great time reading peoples initial thoughts upon becoming new Mahalo users.
This is quite a unique perspective, not surprisingly we are getting a lot of users telling me they come from Yahoo Answers and look at Mahalo as a safe haven away from all the tom-foolery that happens over at Yahoo, new users appear to like the long professional responses and genuine help they are getting from the Mahalo community.
I think soon I'll be reading similar comments that people are coming from Wikipedia.
A good percentage of Wikipedians are nothing but uber-fans who have dedicated a lot of time into curating their page, because they know on Wikipedia, your page is the reference for the entire Internet. Mahalo wants uber-fans claiming Topic pages, all you have to do is be passionate about a topic and Mahalo gives you the resources to build the next Wikipedia style-reference pages for the internet.
Mahalo right now currently gets a majority of the traffic comes for "How To" pages, probably because Mahalo has a large Q&A orientated community. In the future I can see the Topic pages taking off. This Michael Jackson page for example is not only a great search result by giving the top results for links/news/images/videos/tweets and FAQs, this page has the potential of becoming a community hub on the topic and a future starting point for all Internet Michael Jackson needs.
That's just Michael Jackson, every topic ever searched could have a results like this within Mahalo search. Mahalo Topic Archives can be built for rarely changing topics like World War II, this page can only be improved upon and as the years go I can only imagine how well this page will evolve into a timeless archive like the current Wikipedia page on the topic.
On the flip side a page can be build for a Buzzy topic, this page might be popular and huge for 10 minutes, but during those 10 minutes the Mahalo pages gets all the net traffic and owner pockets a few bucks. Oh.. Did I mention Mahalo Pages could be the next blogging job too...geez, thats for another day.
Wow Jeff, this blog is really interesting! I accidentally saw it when looking for Michael Jackson info because I just made a page called Michael Jackson Movie here http://www.mahalo.com/michael-jackson-movie and coincidentally I also linked it to that main Michael Jackson page also!! Too bad there isn't an easy link to staff blogs on the http://www.mahalo.com site somewhere - I know it is on individual accounts but I am usually too busy with pages to surf around that much. Thanks for the insight! My page looks different to me now.