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The tech and "Web 2.0" section of the blogosphere is all a-twitter over the alpha launch of the new "people-powered" search engine, Mahalo, by Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. and Netscape-relaunch fame). I've been checking it out a bit, and have some comments...

There's definitely no mystery under the hood, technology-wise, here: it's simply a locked-down wiki software. MediaWiki, in fact, the same wikiware used to run (and developed by) Wikipedia. Pretty smart, actually, because there's no reinventing the wheel going on, and MediaWiki provides a really slick platform overall. Plus, it's not like his other endeavors have been built on developing new tech—they have, in fact, been people-oriented and built upon existing technologies, which is what he seems to do best (and is successful at it).

On the other hand, this is not a new idea: Mahalo is "guide" driven, by people who filter through the best results for top search terms and build pages for them. I can't help thinking that this makes it just another About.com (at least, from the early days of About.com—a clone without all the cruft that About.com has accumulated over the years), or, even more apt, just another Open Directory Project (which pretty much has been doing the exact same thing for years).

So I'm kinda split. I guess the real question is, "Would I use it?" And generally, the answer is no... since they're only covering the top search terms, and not the esoterica that I'm often searching for (for which I primarily use Google), I don't see it happening. I like the concept, though.

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don't quite get how this is going to work: Publisher launches its first "wiki" novel. It's:

...a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to "wiki" software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

The novel, "A Million Penguins," went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a "believable fictional voice."

So, are they planning on "locking down" chapters as they're finished? Because there's really nothing stopping anybody from going in and changing, well, everything at any point, if it truly is open like Wikipedia. Suddenly chapter three makes no sense because chapters one and two are now telling a different story.

Cool and interesting experiment, though. I might have to play around with it.

Just for grins, and to flex my PHP chops, I decided to write a simple wiki system. The catch, though, is to see how short I can make the actual program; I was inspired by this Shortest Wiki Contest, though I can't profess to be quite as fanatic as those guys (I prefer readable code—squishing it all into a minimal number of obfuscated lines just seems like cheating), I think I did pretty well so far. Read through if you're interested; it's pretty technical and I include the PHP source.

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