Mahalo Answerers on Kiva

Posted by Unknown | Tuesday, February 17, 2009 | , | 0 comments »

Mahalo Answers has been out now for a few months and users are starting to get their first pay. The minimum payout on Mahalo is $40 and 53 users earned that much or more.

40 extra beans for simply sharing your knowledge with users and helping them find what they are looking for...on the internet...human powered search, huh, whodathunk it. Turns out there are lots of people who would pay a buck or two get and get a fast answer without having to dig into the depths of the Google.

Yes, and unlike the algorithms that preceded the human search, these humans that operate the human powered search engine have a conscious look no further than Mahalo Answers purple belt Robbrown asked users what they would do with their first Mahalo payout and suggested users could donate some to Kiva.org.

I thought it was a great idea, I joined his group and made a loan on behalf of the Mahalo Answers community on Kiva.

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It's nice to see Jason's entrepreneurial spirit is being passed on through the very machine we operate in and use online earners can help third world startups, startups of necessity, have a chance at surviving on the other side of the world. ...Kumbaya...

Anyway, if your a Mahalo Answers member, even if you don't want to make a loan, be sure to Join the Kiva.org website and join the Mahalo Answers Team.

The Idiocracy Index

Posted by Unknown | Tuesday, February 17, 2009 | | 0 comments »

I mentioned some time ago on this blog that Kalane and I were working on a new blog project, well we started Idiocracy Index in January and spent some time tweaking, now we find ourselves posting to it with regularity. The Idiocracy Index! basically it's a great collection of articles and stories that serve as evidence to the dumbing down of our society, we work online in the field of research and the number of Idiocracy Index worthy articles we come across is staggering.

The blog is WordPress but we've also been using the Jing tool by Techsmith,which is a tool that makes it easy for us to take a screenshot and get it up on the blog quickly. It makes posting quite efficient and interesting. In the past you might only put a hyperlink or a quote, now you can take a picture of the screen as you see it....back in the day you'd have to hit "print+screen" > go to paint > save > upload...ugh, I'm glad those days are past us.

Did you hear about the Jackson Five Museum/Slavery Theme Park? Neither had we after we heard about it we archived it on the blog using Jing to take a screenshot. The other beauty of Jing is that it can take video. You have to pay a few extra bucks a month, but with one click you can to store videos you take of your screen, store them or even upload it to your YouTube account. We've been using both, Idiocracy Index has an active youtube channel. We use the provided storage for the videos we know will get removed from YouTube. We can also embed those "Video screenshots." Look at how nice this looks. Sure the audio is scratchy and maybe the quailty isn't HDTVXXX, but it's raw, I like it. It looks even better on the Idiocracy Index Blog.



The last element is a Twitter bar in the side, considering we catch more Idiocracy than we can chew, we'll be tweeting. We keep our followers informed on Idiocracy throughout the day without needing to write full blown blog pieces. If you are on Twitter you can follow us here.

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Street Fighter 4

Posted by Unknown | Monday, February 16, 2009 | | 0 comments »

Mahalo games department has been up late again, labouring away at playing video games until they unleash all the secrets. Anyway, this month it was Street Fighter 4. I indulged in watching the trailer and as a fan of the original Street Fighter I must say I am intrigued in this new version, surprisingly the gameplay and graphics look very much as I remember them, it just looks like they added a few graphic enhanced cut scenes and tonnes of characters, you can check out the characters below the trailer.



How to do Stuff

Posted by Unknown | Thursday, February 12, 2009 | | 0 comments »

One of the hidden gems of Mahalo.com is the insanely huge How To section, you can pretty much figure how to do anything, here just a brief list of suggested how-to's from my co-workers who build them, but for a ultimate list check out this link.

2009 Super Bowl Ads

Posted by Unknown | Thursday, January 29, 2009 | 0 comments »

Well its that time of year again, when you can watch 4 hours of worlds most expensive commercials interrupted occasionally with by a football game. What a great time to celebrate mass consumerism then during an economic recession. Umm, anyway, us Canucks don't have the pleasure of seeing the American commercials during the game, but never fear Mahalo.com will be on the ball updating these pages with the commercials as they become available. So go ahead and click through and watch.


Why they love Monty Python

Posted by Unknown | Monday, January 26, 2009 | | 1 comments »

A bunch of big names explain why they love Monty Python, including the South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Luke Wilson, Judd Apatow and others...

What I've been doing

Posted by Unknown | Monday, January 12, 2009 | , , | 3 comments »

Pretty lame job at updating this blog recently, I've been pretty busy with a couple of other projects.

First as you know a month Mahalo launched Answers, which I've helping with on the moderating side of things as well as offering the odd tidbit of research and knowledge, the community over has been growing pretty good, you should check it out or try it out, here is a video that explains it.



Away from Mahalo Karen and I started our own new blog, it's still in the beginning stages and I'm not really ready to plug it out yet, but if you want to check it out its the Idiocracy Index.

January 2 2009 Today in History

Posted by Unknown | Friday, January 02, 2009 | , , , | 0 comments »

Here is Today in History for January 2, 2009.

Here it is in 100 seconds.


Here are the top social questions, one of them is related to the great YellowStone Supervolcano, I found lots of videos about this and posted them here, one that I posted was a two hour long docu-drama from the BBC that just made my morning. But here is a shorter clip from something else.





Other historical videos for this day include footage from Sid Vicious arrest/trial/death - today in history was the beginning of his trial.



Also archived the Ibrox stadium collapse that killed 65 people in Glasgow on this day in 1971. I found this tribute video for the archive

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