By now, most everyone in the web industry is aware of Jason Calacanis (unless of course you live under a rock) and I would imagine most are aware of his latest venture, Mahalo. He has received mixed reviews on his attempt to revive the human powered search model, but to his credit, he seems to be off to a very good start. He is well funded, and claims that he has enough cash flow to stay afloat for five years. The goal for Mahalo was to have the 10,000 most popular search terms indexed (by that I mean create Serps which I believe are search engine results pages) by year end and after the first two weeks he is somewhere in the 4000 range.

So what does a guy like Jason do to speed up the process? He launches Mahalo greenhouse where he is accepting user created Serps in return for compensation for the author. Now it is not a large amount of money, but it is between $10-$15 dollars, which by itself does not seem like much, but in aggregate it could net you a nice chunk of change. Of course they will not be accepting just anything, it must be reviewed by his staff, but if you are pretty decent, it should not be a problem.

I think this was a smart move on his part, as he probably knows that his current staff of 40 most likely could not reach 10,000 by year end. What better way to get to your goal quicker than by enlisting the community to get you there. Not only are they getting paid to do the work, there is also a small sense of ownership that comes along with it.

One thing I do wonder though, is how different is this from PayPerPost paying their community to write for them (which is something that Jason has spoken out against many, many times in the past)?