I’m getting a lot of questions about what this means for me, personally. Immediately, it means that I have more resources to do my job and support our current client roster. Our services have exponentially expanded, and I’m having a lot of fun getting to meet everyone on the new team. I’m also hoping that this frees up some of my time to speak, write and learn more.

And maybe, that means time to blog again.

Some additional posts:
Greg Verdino
Joseph Jaffe
MediaPost
Powered, Inc.
AdWeek

The second is the ability to search for people who are sharing – a feature I’ve wanted for a while. So, ‘scuse me while I go “like” some posts…

Features: (from the website):

• Easy import and export in del.icio.us format.
• Fast site with less clutter.
• Nightly database backups to S3 (welcome, Ma.gnolia users!)
• Lightweight to read status for things you want to look at later
• Private bookmarks and private tags
• Easier bulk editing

The one thing I love? You need to pay to play – and it’s a sliding scale. The earlier you get in, the less you pay (the formula is number of users * $0.001) so join today. Yesterday it jumped from @2.91 to $4.33 and still climbing (although I’m sure there’s a cap coming).  The fee will defray the costs of running the site and also discourage spammers. There’s also a blog and a Google developer group where you can interact with the developer on bugs and requests.

Pinboard is a simple tool that does exactly what it promised without feature bloat or clutter.

I have to say that the MT support people were fantastic and helped over and above scope – and I really appreciate all of their effort. So consider this a STRONG recommendation from someone who uses a number of different hosting services – use MediaTemple.

Thanks again, guys!

Disqus adds threaded comments to your blog, instead of the usual inline comments and or using the @convention. This has been a nagging annoyance of mine – threaded comments makes for understandable conversation flow. It’s hard to interact when every new comment seems to start a new point and conversation, even if it’s an actual reply.

Disqus replaces the existing comment structure with their own (hosted) solution. Once I uploaded and activated the plugin it took me only a few moments to set everything up – I was worried about losing existing comments and checking the “entries with no comments and future posts” option left everything intact. I then went to the Disqus website to set up my profile and enable my settings.

In his post, Fred Wilson says that the number of comments and interaction on his blog has gone up five to tenfold. I tweeted about installing Disqus and immediately got a response from Daniel Ha (co-founder), who pointed me to this FAQ page.

Disqus features:

• Integrates with your blog
• Receive/reply to comments by email or SMS
• You can subscribe to conversations
• Moderate and block unwanted comments/commenters
• Very customizable

Disqus works with a number of blogging platforms including WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger and Tumblr (my next Disqus site!). Sites that have implemented Disqus (according to the post, there are over 10,000 blogs) include Fake Steve Jobs, Scripting News, Rev2.org and, of course, A VC.

I’m looking forward to seeing what impact Disqus has on the conversations on my blog and will update with any significant impact.

Other posts on this topic:

• Mathew Ingram
• Howard Lindzon

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb’s Corvida compares SezWho to Disqus and Intense Debate

Go pre-order his book and look at his videos on WineLibraryTV. Go now.

Jeff Jarvis really captures the excitement and devotion that Gary inspires in anyone who watches his content or is lucky enough to meet him, as well as a great glimpse into his background.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the American Dream personified in Social Media.

Mahalo uses “guides” to build our SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) so that the most relevant results are always given the most importance. The problem is the amount of manpower it takes to build out all of those results. So, besides the actual Mahalo employees, the service looks to crowdsourcing to fill in the results – and will pay them for their work (Mahalo Greenhouse).

Then came Mahalo Social, which added a social component to the service and Mahalo Follow, a way of sharing the links you upload to other services including De.lic.ious, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Jaiku and StumbleUpon. This was actually the piece that helped me get more involved with StumbleUpon, as Tamar Weinberg – AKA Queen of all Social News sites – was always after me about. Using a quick combination of keystrokes, I can easily post a link to all of these sites, or any combination I’d like.

As an aside – I rarely post links to Twitter – I’m protective of my network and don’t want to spam them with a lot of links.

But what makes any company – especially a startup – is the people. And everyone that I’ve had contact with from Mahalo has been impressive. If I send a feature request or some bug report, it’s been rare that I don’t hear from someone within the hour. Jason has been very gracious about forwarding reports to the right people and I always hear back with solutions or a commitment to fix the issue. This has really added to my enjoyment of Mahalo – even when my links are denied (or added!), it’s with a very polite note.

So who uses Mahalo? I”ve started using Mahalo for search results – it’s fun to see what people recommend and I really enjoy the Guide Notes. But the real value is for people who are looking for simple, specific results, or find Google results too confusing. It’s always hard for me to remember that most people don’t use the Web like I do and need easy tools that make them comfortable. Then I spend some time with my sister, an elementary school teacher with her first Mac, who doesn’t know what Twitter is and is nervous about shopping online. So I bookmarked Mahalo for her. With the easy and clean user interface, she’ll be able to find whatever she needs quickly (Google results are also included on the page).

And that’s valuable to both of us.