Mahalo Part Time Guide Frustrations

I signed up as a part time guide on Mahalo because I believe in the idea of human powered search. I'm good at finding sites, and experienced at identifying black hat SEO and I'm also experienced with Wikimedia software.

But after two SERPs I'm ready to throw in the towel. I've come to the conclusion that part time guides aren't particularly valued at Mahalo. My own experience may not be representative, but in my experience, the whole process of contributing to Mahalo is needlessly complicated and unrewarding. I had my second SERP rejected for reasons that seemed extraordinarily arbitrary to me. The full time guide who rejected my SERP requested I include links from at least four sites that had absolutely no information (nothing, zilch, nada) about the subject of the SERP!

I certainly don't think there was no room for improvement in the SERP I wrote, but I think it did stack up to similar SERPs already published in Mahalo. The critique I received back on the SERP had 30 criticisms most of which could also be applied to http://www.mahalo.com/Frank_sinatra or http://www.mahalo.com/John_Coltrane . (Both of these are supposed to be excellent, and one is the designated as the example SERP for the category.)

So all this is so much sour grapes. Sure, I guess. It's really irritating to have something you have worked hard on rejected. Much less rejected 3 times as my first SERP was. Each person who rejected it picked new seemingly increasingly arbitrary reasons for doing so, sometimes contradicting each other in the process. I should have learned that Mahalo is not for me after that experience, but I'm a glutton for punishment.

Here are some of my other peeves about Mahalo Greenhouse:

I am a person who learns mainly by following examples, rather than reading instructions or watching videos. I am also a person who forgets how to do things. So the easiest way for me to
write a SERP would be to look at one. The problem is that I can't, at least not and see the raw content. When I click "edit" (even on a search page I myself have written) it tells me "you can't edit this page if you want to make changes, please make a suggestion yada yada". I don't want to edit the page, I just want to see it. I don't want to watch the video again every time I forget how to make a guide's choice. It's just not the way I think. I think "I've done this before, how did I do it?" Perhaps this is a bad habit ingrained in me by Wikipedia and Wikibooks, but I find it super annoying that I cannot look at examples in order to learn.

Another thing is that there is a place to upload an avatar, but I can't get it to work. Maybe my avatar is too big, or I'm don't have permissions, but when I upload it just takes me back to the page with no error message or anything.

I've also never managed to get the toolbar to actually work for me despite trying on a couple of different computers, and watching that video a couple times and reading the instructions over and over. Since I updated to the newest version it doesn't load the sections. Before that it told me that I wasn't logged in. It may not work for new guides like me, but it doesn't say that anywhere that I could find. It may be an encoding issue because the page I was working on has a funky character in the title. Still, it's pretty disheartening.

It also bothers me that on the page I did write that was accepted it says "This page was written by Juan." (A *paid* Mahalo full time guide.) Uhhh... No it wasn't. It was 95% written by me, I worked hard on it and I should get credit. It says I "created it" but it was "curated" and "written" by Juan. I wonder how many guides have decided to never do another SERP for Mahalo when they discovered that they don't get credit for writing it when the page goes live.

I signed up to have my part time guide earnings go to Wikipedia, but have never received any notification that the money was actually sent. While I believe that it was, an indication of some kind on my profile showing that the money actually made it to Wikipedia would be nice.

One last observation: There are only 142 part time guides who have had ten serps or more accepted. With all of the buzz Mahalo got out of the gate, this seems like an embarrassment to me, and it also seems like an indication that the part-time guide idea has not been a success. After my personal experience, I think I have a good idea why.

Licensing Woes

There's an interesting conversation (here and here) right now about licensing on the Wikimedia foundation-l mailing list. The take-away seems to be that many people at Wikimedia (including perhaps Jimbo Wales) would like to harmonize the GFDL (which is the license that both Wikipedia and Wikibooks are released under) with the Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses. ONe suggestion for the harmonizing process would apparently involve changing the next generation GFDL to closely mirror CCSA2.5. Relying on the agreement to license content under future versions of the GFDL that users accept when they upload content to wikimedia projects.

I may have inadvertently touched off the discussion with a request to multi-license some of my books at Wikijunior. The primary reason I would like to dual license is because the open education community recognizes and seems to have a strong preference for these licenses. It also make cross-pollination with other CCSA works much easier. I'm no expert, but I still don't understand why books that I have created and uploaded to Wikibooks, cannot be dual licensed. For right now I'm taking a wait and see approach.

Pandora vs. Last.fm

I've been playing around with Pandora recently, and I have to say that I'm impressed. When I ask it to create a radio station based on an artist it really does a good job of picking songs. Much better than I could do. I'm listening to Modest Mouse radio now, and it's played a song by the Strokes, Bishop Allen, and one by Death Cab for Cutie. The songs Pandora picked actually _sound_ like Modest Mouse. Likewise with Cat Power last night (Cranberries, Alina Simone, Damien Jurado). The backbone of Pandora is the music genome project; people who not only like music, but also know about how it's made, classifying songs and artists. In this sense it is not only human powered, but expert powered and this could make all the difference.

By comparison, last.fm seems clumsy; relying on genres, crowd-sourcing and informal tagging to group songs and artists. I've found some good music with last.fm and I've spent many hours training it. But it still misses almost as often as it hits for me.

I'm looking forward to playing with Pandora some more. Meanwhile here's a link to my first attempt at a Pandora station: Spin Sad.

Looking for pownce, jaiku Invites

If either of the people who read this blog have invites for Pownce or Jaiku I would like to be invited. Email xixtas at gmail dot com, please.