I don’t really care much for original content on the net, except when I am going to link to it, which is something I do rarely (because I rarely find things I feel I can link to without being completely out of context).

Wiki is not a bad neighborhood, but it’s not a very reliable resource either.

I have to admit that when the first few times you or guides responded, the tone was always “Come on! It’s great! Anyway, it’s beta.”

But now, it looks like there are some more fundamental changes — like getting that javascript into the hands of the guides. (Sure, Andy’s right: it’s not the highest tech or most thorough plagiarism check possible. But the fact is, it’s the correct quick solution to the problem Jason had which is: The guides need some easy tool to quickly check for rampant plagiarism. )

So… all in all, the javascript looks like the right move for Mahalo. Rubrics to supplement those long winded style guides etc. would be very helpful.

Mahalo does need need to automate a fair amount of stuff so they can limit the human effort to the parts that really require humans. Strangely enough, I do have ideas for some stuff Jason should have Mahalo do.

But hey. I have to do some stuff for Argonne (my real job) before the end of the fiscal year. And anyway, who knows? Maybe he’s already thought of the things I’d suggest anyway.

The only way you could tempt me would be to fund my startup and persuade Brian to come on as CTO ;)
But then it is in many ways a sneaky (though technically whitehat) SEO play, but we both know that most of your interests are in sneaky (but whitehat) SEO plays of one kind or another ;)

I really should change the default buttons on my distribution of the Sociable plugin (Antisocial). At least the links are nofollowed on my distribution.

Yes, you are correct about having a serious of rubrics. We have been building those since the start and automating them is obviously the holy grail. We’ve been automating what we can as we grow, in many ways this is similar to the Wikipedia.

Of course, the first step in automation is having humans really understand and test the process.

We’ve been testing a dead line checker for a long time, and we’ll have something public in the next month or two.

Sometimes the new Guides we’re training make mistakes and link to sites which have expiring URLs, but as a group we’re learning what sites those are and how to route around them.

So, we’re just past the first 90 days and I’m thrilled with how far we have come. I think a multi-level approach is the best:

a) hiring great people
b) training them really well
c) creating tools and automation to help solve problems
d) asking the public to help (i.e. the report a problem links and Lucia’s non-stop free consulting! :-)

all the best,

Jason

I told Jason about the scraper site on his climate change page on Sphinn. Later I emailed and suggested he should write some rubrics for his guide to make sure they actually checked for plagiarism. He emailed back and told me he’d found the javascript. I suggested he figure out how to get his guides to use it!

Well, give Jason credit for actually getting the tool in the guides hands. Hopefully, they will use it.

Mahalo does seriously need some tools and ‘bots to help them! ( I mean… there were 5 dead links on the climate page on a day it was edited. Someone on Sphinn reported a redirect from “jesus in food” to a casino page. These things could be detected with appropriate ‘bots.)

Maybe Jason can get this thing to work but it doesn’t seem promising. Still, if he can use some ‘bots to discover dead links, redirects plagiarism etc. it may not be totally hopeless.