Earlier today Google announced that Google Knol is now open to the public. Danny Sullivan has an awesome overview of how Google Knol works.

I thought this would be a good time to compare three crowdsourced encyclopedias: Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia. Each one takes a different angle on why you should contribute.

Do you participate in any of these crowdsourced encyclopedias? If so, what factors helped make your decision? Was it to help the "greater good" or was it a financial decision?

Here are some thoughts on each encyclopedia and why people contribute to each:

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Last week marked the apparent end of one man’s blogging career. Most believe that it is a hoax but I know that this individual would never use trickery or magic potions to get more traffic to his startup. This person has created a mailing list to more effectively communicate with his network. I can’t link to the mailing list because it was capped at 500 1,000 1,100. Steven Hodson has deciphered the email for the rest of us.

I wasn’t planning on posting about this topic but I just received a video from the "blogger king" at the "blogger information network" - apparently there is a program to actually effectively quit blogging. Anyway have a look below and you decide for yourself. The full email blast is located here.

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We initially reviewed blog directory Blogged earlier this year. It’s a human curated blog directory that provides a (somewhat bogus) score for each blog. Today Blogged is back with their launch of a news portal site. Blogged editors will pull breaking news and the most compelling stories from their content categories (technology, entertainment, sports, etc.) and then displays the stories on the frontpage.

Here is how Blogged compares itself to the other news sites like Google News and Yahoo News along with the "meme trackers" like TechMeme:

Google News and Yahoo News feature top stories from traditional news sources using a combination of technology and human editors. Memetrackers such as Techmeme and Blogrunner use algorithms to identify and present related stories as told by cliques of bloggers related to a particular industry. User-generated news communities such as Mixx, Digg, and Reddit showcase popular stories daily from across the Web as saved and voted on by individuals. Blogged.com is the only community that features the top qualified stories, representing all popular topics, organized by categories from around the blogosphere, combined with a full informational directory that includes rankings, reviews and recommended reading for each blog.

Today’s launch by Blogged seems very similar to what Blogrunner offers except that it’s human curated versus machine-driven. From a gathering the news standpoint, it’s basically like Mahalo. Both Mahalo and Blogrunner create tag pages, Mahalo uses their staff and volunteers to find links, Blogrunner uses computers to find the links. Blogged seems to be more in the Mahalo style but without the tag pages.

I don’t know how large the Blogged team is, but my only question is whether they be able to stay on top of all of the breaking news across so many categories and be able to bubble up the news in (near) real-time? If so, awesome. Also, I hope they will provide diversity in the blogs that they pimp.

They should add a social layer on top of the news - since they know a lot about each blog, there’s a wealth of information they could layer on top of the news and create a community effect on top of the news.

Everyone consumes news in different ways and the one-page category portal-style overveiew should work well for a mainstream audience.

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With Yahoo signing away their advertising business today to Google, I thought it would be interesting to look at the major search engines and see who handles their advertising. Have a look at the list below and check out just how dominant Google is. You wonder why no one is using the other search engines — it’s easy, if the search engine can’t sell ads, perhaps their technology isn’t as good either, right? Please add other engines in the comments and I will add them to the list.

	Company	Advertising Partner	Notes
	Google	Google
	Yahoo	Yahoo/Google	Google ads to begin in three months.
	Ask	Google
	Microsoft	Microsoft
	YouTube	Google
	AOL	Google
	Facebook	n/a	Facebook runs their "social ads".
	hakia	Yahoo	Per the conference call today, hakia will now be able to run Google ads as well
	Mahalo	Google	Mahalo no longer claims to be a search engine
	Wikia	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	Twerq	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	MySpace	Google
	a9	Amazon	Ads are related items from Amazon.com

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Yesterday we learned that Brijit has closed its doors (at least temporarily). When I interviewed Founder & CEO Jeremy Brosowsky back in December, one of the topics we discussed was my concern about their business model. Trying to pay a staff (in this case writers) with CPC advertising is very difficult. I’d like to note that my conversation with Jeremy was one of my favorites to-date; Jeremy is a very bright guy.

As I thought about Brijit some more last night, Mahalo came to mind. Mahalo utilizes a similar structure to Brijit in that they have a team of writers and link scrapers who scour the Internet for the latest hot topic to create Mahalo pages for. Brijit created article abstracts which is similar to the content Mahalo creates around a topic. Mahalo adds a variety of links on the topic while Brijit only linked to the original source article. Mahalo has also created many "how-to" articles which are much more in-depth and pay more (some are up to $150 per how-to).

One of the differences between Brijit and Mahalo is that Mahalo has very strong search engine rankings. CEO Jason Calacanis has become a master SEO and this will help Mahalo over the long-term. Brijit didn’t have good search engine rankings and I think this was a major factor in their lack of ability to generate revenue. Calacanis does an excellent job in "sending" pagerank to Mahalo through his very authoritative calacanis.com blog. Calacanis also has 20,000+ Twitter followers and each time he posts a link to Mahalo, some percentage (my guess is 2-4%) will click through. Both of these traffic drivers require no marketing expenditure which can help to drive the ROI up. Mahalo relies on two types of traffic: search engines and Calacanis’ shills - both on his blog and on Twitter.

Brijit paid a flat rate $5/abstract while Mahalo pays both full-time salaries to its in-house employees and a sliding scale to it’s freelancers. While most of the pages on Mahalo will take years to return the money invested to create the pages, a few gems should be able to take care of the load. My guess is that their 100+ Grand Theft Auto 4 walkthrough pages will be some of those gems. Mahalo is banking on the gems.

Last month we learned that Mahalo workers need to write more words to capture more search engine rankings and we also learned that Mahalo is testing affiliate relationships as a way to increase revenue.

Mahalo has already started to push link research to the "free" community. I imagine we will see more pushed to the free side to maximize the ROI over time.

If Mahalo staffers aren’t looking at why Brijit didn’t work, they should. It could provide some valuable insight in how to avoid similar issues from affecting Mahalo.

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Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo has borrowed from the Simon Fuller Idol franchise in its search for the new host for Mahalo Daily by announcing Mahalo Idol.
Potential hosts are asked to respond to the above video on YouTube showing their best side, or turn up to a casting call in Los Angeles April 19. Idol style host […]

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis had a busy week last week. We learned of three major Mahalo updates: they are now a research engine, if you want to get paid you must write more and link less, SEO is critical for the success of the research engine.

Mahalo is no longer a search engine as it was classified upon the initial launch nearly a year ago. Calacanis is now calling his company a "research engine". While I don’t think it’s a search engine, it’s not a research engine either. The closest thing I could compare it to is a combo of delicious plus a couple paragraphs of juicy content.

When Mahalo launched,