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funkygorilla
I am a use of both Sphinn and Mahalo and to be honest I was very surprised at this article. When you look back at the original story on SEObook it is obvious that the writter has had some run in with Jason Calacanis and so has an axe to grind.
Mahalo and other similar experiments in social search are interesting in that they ask us users to recommend pages. I have been doing this for some time now (see my pages here) and have found interesting and valuable links through the few friends I have! To be honest I would have been unlikely to find some of these links elsewhere, just because of the huge volume you have to wade through, and having a physical person recommend the site makes me feel more inclined to believe it. Okay, so having said that hopefully you can see that Mahalo is a useful and valid site to people like me, if not for the author of the original article.
Where things get a bit less clear is the particular page we are talking about. From earlier comments more content will be added which I think will help, however just looking through the search results on Google.com in Australia, I have Mahalo, then 4 shopping sites, then C-Net. If you look at computer speakers you get shopping sites.
So why the difference? In my opinion if I search for "best computer speakers" I am looking for independent reviews of speakers, not shopping sites. This makes Mahalo and C-Net the only valid sites hear, and the other sites spam. No matter what you say about the content in Mahalo, user generated or not, it does provide an independent view of which is the best, which shopping sites are hardly going to recommend something they don't sell. On the other hand if I search for "computer speakers" I am looking to buy and the shopping sites are the most valid returned searches.
In other words, Google has it right, "best computer speakers" returns the correct result at the number one position. really it should be a competition between Mahalo and CNet purely on a white hat basis.
Once again I am surprised at this article. I know that Sphinn publishes from anyone that cares to write, but if you are hoping to promote yourself in this field, a little thought please!
I totally agree that you should look at what the company wants, but as an expert you should also help to guide them. There are some great articles on what some of the social media platforms do in 'enterprise 2.0'. For example from a wiki you can expect good group collaboration on a document, for a social network you can expect knowledge gain etc.
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Story: Official - Mahalo is Spam, According to Google's Internal Spam Documents