A Week in the Life of Mahalo

Working for Mahalo.com is a kick.

One skill I have is synthesis. I can read a bunch of varied resources and synthesize a general public article on archaeology very quickly and, if I do say so, adroitly, pointing it towards an educated adult crowd. But, lately I've wondered if I didn't specialize myself into a corner, by choosing archaeology as the sole topic to write on. Archaeology is really not that marketable---I find it fascinating, and there are several hundred thousand people on the planet that find it fascinating, too. But today there are hundreds of writers and bloggers who write about archaeology, some even more specialized than I am. My archaeology synthetic skills are probably not as useful as they were a decade ago, now that there is Wikipedia in the world: but you do what you do.

Or so I thought. I was a little leery of Mahalo.com, where you must synthesize information on everything from software to celebrity gossip to world news to the financial crisis to the latest bizarro murder case where Mrs. x is stuffed into a suitcase and left in a forest. I've never had to read and synthesize data so fast in my life. Safe to say it's really honing my skills. Here's a list of all the pages I developed in the last week:


http://www.mahalo.com/David_Blaine_Blind
http://www.mahalo.com/Sallie_Krawcheck
http://www.mahalo.com/NYC_Gross_Matchbooks
http://www.mahalo.com/Mikasa_Foods
http://www.mahalo.com/WTC_Center_Pothole
http://www.mahalo.com/Bill_Clinton_On_The_View
http://www.mahalo.com/Latarian_Milton
http://www.mahalo.com/Dave_Hill_Fashion_Week
http://www.mahalo.com/Daniel_Katz
http://www.mahalo.com/Palin_Syrah
http://www.mahalo.com/Dave_Chameides
http://www.mahalo.com/Bill_Perkins_Ad
http://www.mahalo.com/McCain_Press_Conference
http://www.mahalo.com/McCain_Top_Ten_Blowups
http://www.mahalo.com/Presidential_Debate_Drinking_Game
http://www.mahalo.com/Sarah_Palin_Flute
http://www.mahalo.com/Scott_Greenstein
http://www.mahalo.com/Gary_Staton
http://www.mahalo.com/Richard_Millay
http://www.mahalo.com/Emma_Forrest
http://www.mahalo.com/Colin_Farrell_Emma_Forrest
http://www.mahalo.com/Colin_Farrell_Judaism
http://www.mahalo.com/Juan_Antonio_Velez_Gonzalez
http://www.mahalo.com/Brandon_Michael_Soroka
http://www.mahalo.com/Mortgage_Bailout_Plan
http://www.mahalo.com/Stopthehousingbailout.com
http://www.mahalo.com/TPG_Capital
http://www.mahalo.com/Washington_Mutual_JP_Morgan_Sale
http://www.mahalo.com/Taliban_Peace_Plan
http://www.mahalo.com/Sam_Botner
http://www.mahalo.com/Omar_Yoguez_Singu
http://www.mahalo.com/Marcella_Grace_Eiler
http://www.mahalo.com/Global_Electoral_College
http://www.mahalo.com/Drea_Bock
http://www.mahalo.com/Robert_Vezendy
http://www.mahalo.com/Scraper_Bike_Rap
http://www.mahalo.com/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008

And compared to many of my colleagues at Mahalo.com I'm a piker!

Oh, I'm not giving up archaeology. I have too much invested in it to just abandon it, and there are still stories I want to tell. But... how good it is to know I don't have to rely on writing about just archaeology to make a living.

Mahalo, and Thanks to You, Too!

In August I started working part time for Mahalo.com (in addition to the About.com gig), partly because I needed a new challenge and partly in these tough economic times I needed the dough. So far, it's fabulous: I recommend it as a resource and as a job. Here's why:

Did ya notice how impossible it is to find the important bits of a story? You know, there's a news story going around and hard as you try you can only find bloggers of one slant or another ranting about the issue or the same news report published in a dozen different newspapers with slightly different titles. Drives me nuts.

Well, Mahalo has hired a bunch of us to do that research for you. So that, whether you need to know the latest poop on the mortgage bailout crisis or what David Letterman thinks about John McCain bailing on him or if David Blaine is cheating or what Bill Clinton really said on The View, or even who Clay Aiken is dating, somebody at Mahalo has already done the digging for you.

As a place to work, I'm nuts about it. The work is challenging--you have to stay neutral no matter how much of a wonk or wonkette you are--but it's also exhilarating.

So--that's what I've been up to lately. More later...