- Newsweek, Tuesday, March 11, 2008 10:45 AM
Bulldogs on skateboards, kittens falling asleep, the lip-synching masses, it's all so very 2006--at least, as far as Silicon Valley VCs are concerned. The Cult of the Amatuer is losing steam, as
the same entrepreneurs that once funded Web 2.0 startups are now shifting their focus back to the expert. Why? The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web.
Sites like Wikipedia and Craigsist are still brought to task for the stuff they get wrong: the inaccuracies, the scams and fraud. For example, ever wonder who edits Wikipedia pages? Last summer,
researchers in Palo Alto found that more than 50 percent of the sites edits came from 1 percent of its users. Since then, Google has launched a Wikipedia competitor called Knol, which calls on experts
to create, edit and maintain entries.
As Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis says, "Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0-the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer
on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined." Which is partly what Calacanis hopes to achieve with Mahalo, a "human search engine" that employs real
editors to improve search results and eliminate spam.
Read the whole story at Newsweek »