This is a key insight. Mahalo will not beat Wikipedia for Bob Dylan on Google in the short term, but we will beat Wikipedia for Bob Dylan Bootlegs, Bob Dylan Tickets and Bob Dylan tShirts.

Why?

Because Wikipedia doesn't have those pages. Mahalo can create 20 pages for every topic page on Wikipedia. with 20x the number of pages Mahalo will have 60m pages to Wikipedia 3m. That means we will win in the long term.

Also, our contributors will be making $100M in five years--and so will Mahalo. :-)

I do not believe the goal of mahalo is to beat wikipedia, Mahalo to me is a golden niche. you see wikipedia does not have ad revenue, and Mahalo does.
As Jason says they will always have the #1 spot for Bob Dylan but not for associated information on Bob Dylan. That is where the niche lies, you see if you can create 20 to 60 pages around every subject that wikipedia has and insert ad revenue, Ta-Da. You see Wikepida has left a lot of money and Information on the table so to speak and Jason has opted to share this niche with all the users here at Mahalo, working toward one common goal.
( revenue )
It can only be obtained and maintained by the high standards Mahalo sets for it's pages and content.
If you actually set down and look at Wikipedia's hit's and then multiply the amount of pages Mahalo forms for the same subject, add revenue to those associated pages, multiply by the hits to revenue, The amount is astrological.
It is a genius idea.

I also believe that with the new changes coming into effect, the Vertical Managers per se are the elite of Mahalo, they have the knowledge and understanding about the creation of pages and rankings. So in effect Jason is expanding his team in a wise direction, by allowing them to over see, per se page managers, the creation of pages will increase and the quality of content will stay at the same or rise.
So in effect the amount of quality pages should increase with the minimum amount of cost.

Bottom line, More quality pages = more revenue
minimal raise in cost

Great Answer @omicron, It is definitely not mahalos' niche to take on a factorial information source as wikipedia, like omicron said mahalo is more for finding the cookie crumbs, the stuff that is left out of wikipedia.

Great Answer, Mike !

Would you please explain what is the cookie crumbs for me! Sorry, if I bother you

I'm a tad confused by this comment:

S: "It is definitely not mahalos' niche to take on a factorial information source as wikipedia,"

R: "factorial? As in y=x!, or is that a typo and you meant to say "factoidal"?

S: "like omicron said mahalo is more for finding the cookie crumbs, the stuff that is left out of wikipedia."

R: That's nothing at all anything like what I said. Not even remotely.

What you're talking about here is (visualize it) something like a two-dimensional flagstone surface, where wikipedia is covering the areas marked by the flag stones, and some other service is trying to cover the spaces inbetween the flagstones... what call the "crumbs"... and this is so totally not what I'm saying about mahalo that I've found myself re-reading the original post to see where you could have got that image.

Do you understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence?

Are you one of those people who think they are the same thing, and that they are interchangeable terms?

Well, they're not.

Using athletics as a metaphor, knowledge is like the muscle, and intelligence is like the coordination.

Wikipedia is functioning like the muscle. It's just a repository of fact... of factoidal information.

What Mahalo should be doing is the process of taking that information and *interpreting* it, the way an analyst would.

In other-words, it's not on the two-dimensional surface of the flagstone floor... it's in the space above, in a three-dimensional realm, constructing three-dimensional formations of information.

There are lots of people, i.e. executives, and intelligence analysts, who depend on these "executive briefs" because more and more, the executive "MBA" class of people has become taken over by people who got their by "who-you-know" instead of what-they-know, and they are called upon to make decisions way outside of their actual intellectual league, and so they count on analysts that also have vision to show them how the pure factoidal information like is found on wikipedia and which anybody would have found if they just bothered to read and encyclopedia and remember it, or go a library and learn how touse a card catalog (but believe it or not, there's a whole generation of people coming up who don't know how to do that and are paralyzed without online access to something like wikipedia... just like there was generation before who got brain-blanked by pocket calculators such that they can't do long division by hand) and now the next stage is going to be people who, even with the information made easy at their fingertips the way wikipedia does it, they still don't can see how to put it together in cross-linked, interdisciplinary conceptual forms, and so they become dependent upon conceptual analysts to assemble the facts into "executive brief" sized concepts telling them what the facts mean, so they can hope to make an intelligent executive decision even though they actually don't have the natural skill for the job.

It's not like "picking crumbs" of factoidal information somehow missed by wikipedia at all. It's formation of concepts and insights from that information for people who don't have the mental ability to form concepts from facts for themselves.

There's three classed of consolidated "executive brief" information as a function of the cognitive mode used to form it from the information available, and I can get into that later, but level I (no it's not called level I in reality, I'm just using that term for it here for the sake of brevity, because if I use the full term I'll have to explain the brain wiring behind it) can be offered for free and paid for with banner advertising alone, level II can be paid for with tips, and level II, which hasn't been done yet but which will eventually once things are built up and the owner(s) are seeing how to organize the information on a cognitive level, is the stuff that you charge real corporate execs and politicians and diplomats a pretty penny for...

... and *none* if it has anything to do with "crumbs" on the floor between what wikipedia has somehow missed. It's reformulation of the pure factoid information for a whole new level of information, so... what did you *mean* by "finding the cookie crumbs", and why did you think I said anything even remotely like that?

That which is a pure consolidation of widely distributed factoidal information into compressed "executive briefs", and that's handy for simply abbreviating into an abstract a digested form of the information that's there, and it's useful for saving time, but it's not really *adding* any new insights... and that's what 97.3% of the Mahalo writers will be doing, and it's based upon the fact that 97.3% of all people are either of a left-hemisphere or a right-hemisphere preferred cognitive mode.

Briefs written by someone who is left-hemisphere dominant will be very linear and analytical, and briefs written by those who are right-hemisphere dominant will tend to be very visual.

However, in neuropsychology, it's been learned that 2.7% of the population have what is called "mixed hemispherical dominance", and those people can think in a visual form and (and this is key) not have to pipe it through their left-hemisphere after they've had the vision in order to see if it makes any logical sense. In other words, those are the ones who can think logically conceptual,

I'm sure you understand how decision m

like omicron said mahalo is more for finding the cookie crumbs, the stuff that is left out of wikipedia.

A+ on going to the source links in each Wikipedia article. I wish we all though enough to dig a little deeper than Wikipedia.

Hi Freshone,
Do you know that Mahalo has topic pages, too, and not just answers? For an example, here is a link to one of the topic pages that I manage:
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