Jason Calacanis is pretty much the definition of entrepreneur. The guy has run company after project after company with energy and gusto. Producing more content everyday than most “legitimate new media experts” can produce in a month while some how managing to build an audience for his brand of self.

His latest start up Mahalo is a human-powered search engine.  Many start ups would love to be human powered but just can’t get anyone to produce content for free.  Jason brings a unique value proposition to any 2.0 startup by having an audience that wants to be involved and engaged.  Mahalo does it’s best to cover the top 50,000 or so searches providing human-edited results.  They rely on both expert labour and a mechanical turk like greenhouse to produce their timely results.  The site itself keeps it’s loyal user base active by having a well produced podcast starring internet star Veronica Belmont and having Jason do the rounds online.  By understanding the audience who will build the community that supports the site produce content, Mahalo succeeds and all fronts. 

In the search landscape, they are the new school grassroots… reminiscent of the early days of the Yahoo directory.  Check them out and thanks for the free stuff.

I have always been fascinated by easy ways to aggregate content to populate a website but have not found something to quickly share links without filling out a form.  There are tons of ways to post to social news sites but what if you want to roll content into your own site.  Solutions like parsing the RSS feed from Google Reader shared items work, but the content has to be from within a walled garden.  Often the things I want to share I find in a non-linear way, just clicking around, and adding it to my site requires filling out the form and writing a post for Wordpress.  Really all I want to say was, I way here, at this time, click if you want.

I found the site Instapaper.com after seeing Jim Louderback Twitter to check out Popsiren.   Looks like a fine content for the female demographic I suppose, not really my style but it delivered a pretty useful link.  Instapaper, is a service created by Marco, that really helped me kill a pain and inspired me to roll a similar interface into future systems.   Instapaper lets you use a bookmarklet that simply captures the site your currently on to an RSS feed.  You create an account and use the bookmarklet to populate the site and therefore an RSS feed with a link list.

Once you have an RSS feed, you can parse it however you want. In my case, the brand new Now Reading widget on the sidebar.  The One-Click solution to linking makes it a no brainer to getting content to a central location.  This amount of elegance really has to be commended and is inspiring.  Instapaper is a winner in my book.  By removing the resistance of creating content you can create Click Casts for your own page or site.   Click Casts are unique from sharing items using a service, because generally you can’t reuse the links you create.  As well, it allows you to advise your audience as to what you’ve been upto online in a sort of new way. 

Instapaper’s fricitonless functionality is missing from many bookmarklet content creation solutions for both CMS and groupware.  I will work out the bugs of my RSS parser for my Now Reading Click Cast, hopefully I will be able to release a wordpress plugin that isn’t reliant upon a middleman solution (sorry Instapaper, but I don’t want to use your service in a way you didn’t intend).

Check out the Now Reading Section of the left.

If you want to add this type of functionality to your site now. You can grab an instapaper account and simplepie’s rss code.  There is a plugin available for Wordpress. Use Simplepie’s php to parse the RSS feed provided on Instapaper’s site.  That’s it, you have a click cast… go out and click to share.  Aswell, using something like a Twitterfeed you can broadcasts your ClickCasts via Twitter.   Call it the Scrobbling of surfing.

The possibilities are not quite but approaching infinite.  I guess you could call it a Mashup to innovate the link.

Finally, Yahoo has taken the beta-wrapping off and announced their new social bookmarking/news service Yahoo Buzz.  Given all the pink slips lately over at Yahoo! I am surprised and pleased they are still able to get products out the door.

Buzz is much like social bookmarking site Digg, allowing users to submit content, to be voted up or down by the user base(Buzzed in this case).  The service allows you to syndicate your submission across other bookmarking sites and is promising that popular content will be passed along to Yahoo! editors to be pushed along to the Yahoo homepage.   Enticing both Average Joes and SEOs to use the service to expose themselves to Yahoo.com’s enormous traffic.

Yahoo is doing some unique things, users submitting content will be pre-approved and ranked, and the Buzz ranking is mashed with search trends.  Techmeme meets Digg + Yahoo.com front page incentive.  This could get interesting.

What’s perplexing to me is why not harness the power of Del.icio.us to power and influence Buzz in a more transparent manner.  The Del.icio.us user base has proven to be a dedicated and savvy bunch.  Their tech niche slant may be the reason for Yahoo’s reluctance to push to Del.icio.us to the fore front.  Making Del.icio.us main stream could alienate current users of the service and may slant the Buzz service to become tech centric and therefore unmarketable on the Yahoo.com homepage.

There is however, the ability to create crossover benefits between the two services.  

• Auto bookmarking for Buzz users to their del.icio.us accounts
• Meta-tag information from delicious can be used to enhance buzz results.
• Buzz front page content customization based upon del.icio.us account history
• The ability to create a social network “Buzz” index metric for ad services.  (Empirical Viral Measurement anyone?)

Buzz is the new kid, let see if it finds it’s niche or revolutionizes the market.

So Toshiba has officially killed the HD-DVD format, but the name should live on.

After all, it is far more descriptive in name than it’s blu-ray counterpart.

With many retailers calling HD-DVD players HDMI players to move them off the shelf, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the HD DVD nomenclature. 

When you buy a new tv, you buy an HDTV, when you subscribe for Hi Definition channels with you cable/satellite provider, you get the HD package.  But, when you want to buy a HD player, you go with Blu-Ray now.  This makes absolutely no sense from the average misinformed consumer standpoint.  In fact, Blu-Ray as a product sounds like a new Pixar film.

If the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps got their heads out of their collective behinds, we should see a mutually amicable sale of the HD-DVD trademark.  In order to minimize confusion in the market, the name Blu-Ray should be dropped.  Just look at the name, what about Blu-Ray says HD?  Nothing, and it will take a much larger marketing effort to create Blu-Ray HD awareness than a simple name swap would.  After all, this is what we are talking about; versatile discs with HD content.

Mark my words, we will be calling Blu-Ray HD-DVD in no time.