Figure 1: Our Mahalo User Activity Page found here: http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Mahaloactivity

If you’re curious what people are doing besides searching on Mahalo, you should check out our User Activity page. This page contains all submitted links, message board posts, and reported problems for the past week. You can even adjust the start and end date to see all such activity on Mahalo to date.

Each section provides links to the page with which it is associated, so you can click over to that search term and view a particular message board post in context, make sure that a reported problem flagged as Resolved has really been addressed, or to see if a link was accepted into the search result or if it is still waiting for more recommendations.

The Part Time Guides, that remarkable band of search results page creators, have a whole new world to explore—ours! We’ve just added a Geography page to the list of Most Wanted search results pages—soon, every country in the world will have a high-quality, spam free page on Mahalo! If you want to help us create these pages, join the Greenhouse… we’ll pay you for every search results page we accept for use on Mahalo!

This week, our Full Time Guides particularly enjoyed adding these Greenhouse search results to the ever-expanding map of Mahalo:

• Cool Hand Luke by Cathy C
• Marx Brothers by Drew C
• Solid State Drive by Quinn
• Motown Records by Bernice
• The Catcher In The Rye by Deborah K

The journey continues!

The How To section has exploded over the past few weeks, and people are taking notice. Lifehacker picked up on our How to Write a Resume page today, and wrote up our page on flying with pets a few weeks ago. The blog Gadling has also featured several of our how tos, including Learning Japanese with Akira Kurosawa.

Last week we tested and took photographs for Jonathan’s How to Make Sushi and Lelah’s How to Make Perfect Sushi Rice. The results, as our Guides can tell you, were quite tasty.

Keep an eye on the How To category for more upcoming how tos, including pages on creating a blog, customizing your MySpace, and deep frying anything. Can we deep-fry an iPhone? Stay tuned…

Three weeks ago the Mahalo Mentors accepted 43 search results to Mahalo, two weeks back they got up to 50, and this past week they hit 59 accepted search terms!

Not only is the productivity increasing but starting September 1st, Mentors will receive a $10 bonus for every SeRP they get accepted to Mahalo after their first 20 per month. Those who want to do exceptional work will be rewarded exceptionally!

Here are some of our favorite search results pages from the last seven days in the Mahalo Greenhouse, as chosen by our Full Time Guides in our Santa Monica office:

• Freemasons by Mindy H.
• Advanced Placement Program by Jana
• Pride and Prejudice by Jesse Clark
• Wounded Knee Massacre by Lindsay F.
• Geoffrey Chaucer by Jennifer Hudock

Travel-related search results pages are a popular part of Mahalo, and our Part Time Guides enjoy creating them. We’ve added a number of videos to help Part Time Guides build their travel pages. Take a look at how we build travel search results pages!

We recently launched Mahalo Follow, a browser extension for Firefox that helps you compare Mahalo results to your current search engine’s results, side-by-side.

All you have to do is install Mahalo Follow and continue to use your current search engine. When you search for a term that Mahalo covers, Mahalo Follow displays Mahalo results in a sidebar. It’s a great way to try Mahalo.

Mahalo Follow can also help you discover great links as you browse the web by automatically detecting relevant Mahalo links based on the content of the page you’re viewing.

See Mahalo Follow in action:

Learn more and install Mahalo Follow

If you’re interested in winning great prizes (20-inch 2.0GHz iMac, iPhone, Nintendo Wii) for promoting Mahalo Follow, check out the Mahalo Follow Contest.

Creative Commons image by whatcounts / David Geller

Steve Balmer might have looked a little crazy, but he had the right idea when he chanted Developers, Developers, Developers! and here at Mahalo we are starting to chant as well.

On top of regular updates to the site, we are starting to roll out some tools for developers and asking them to comment back and give us feedback via our Mahalo Developers Google Group. One of the first tools we have released is our OPML versions of our pages, which should allow 3rd party developers to parse out our data fairly easily.

We are working on JSON and RSS formats as well! I urge everyone to join in on the conversation, we are building these out for you to play with our data and your feedback is greatly welcomed!

The Mahalo Mentors (MMs) are a team of highly skilled part time guides (PTGs) who quality control (QC) search engine results pages (SeRPs) and help other PTGs build great SeRPs.

Visit Mahalo’s MM page to learn more about the program and check out the MM Weekly to see what the MMs are working on right now!

Last month, in the first week of the program our MMs QC’d and accepted 17 SeRPs to Mahalo. This past week they got to 50 SeRPs! The MM team is rapidly growing in size and efficiency by the day, so stay tuned for future developments.

Something big has come out of Mahalo and the Greenhouse… something everyone can take part in, and benefit from!

Mahalo Follow is a Firefox extension that brings you the best search results from Mahalo when you use another search engine, or even when you’re just browsing the web.

It’s such a great way to showcase Mahalo’s nearly 10,000 high-quality, spam-free search results pages, we want Greenhouse Part Time Guides to share it with everyone they know… and we’ve got prizes for the Part Time Guides who best spread the good word. Read the full details of the contest. If you don’t already have a Greenhouse account, by all means, join us — and in addition to the Mahalo Follow contest, we’ll pay you for every search results page you create that we accept onto the main Mahalo site!

Speaking of great search results pages grown in the Greenhouse, here are some examples from the last seven days:

• Frank Miller by DrewC
• Louisiana Purchase by KerryAnn B
• History of France by Walshga
• Angel Food Cake by Bernice S
• Les Misérables by Matt B

Over 2,000 search results pages have been created by some of our nearly 1,000 Part Time Guides — the Greenhouse continues to inspire, energize, and exceed expectations! Get Mahalo Follow, and see how the incredible content created by our full and part time Guides can enhance and enrich your Internet experience.

Wow! There goes the second month in the Greenhouse! We’re two thirds of the way through a whole season!

So where do we stand?

• As this is being written, 1,711 search results pages have been accepted from the Greenhouse into Mahalo. Some of our favorites this week include…
  • Kyuss by Lynn R
  • Mary Poppins by Matt B
  • Girl Scout Cookies by Bernice S
  • Douglas Adams by Catchinwaves
  • Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem by Jnpeacoc
• We have grown to 838 Part Time Guides!
• There are now eleven Mahalo Mentors teaching and helping new part time guides through their first search results pages.

In our offices in sunny Santa Monica, the Full Time Guides are working hard to shorten the time it takes to quality control a search results page and bring it from the Greenhouse to Mahalo. We’ve added Resources and Style Guides to help our part time guides build better pages faster… and a new video! Take a look at how we learn to Recognize Good and Bad Links:

Every week, our Part Time Guides become more accomplished and grow as a community proud of their involvement in Mahalo. Want to be part of it?