Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. fame anounced yesterday his latest startup Mahalo.

It’s a search engine with editor-picked results. It’s still in aplha and it may take a couple of years to get to a beta stage. (TechCrunch has all the details).

To me it looks like a wikipedia of search. It could work if Jason manages to attract a critical mass of editors. I’ll wait and see. I have the impression that Jason is betting on something else to make this thing work. A browser plugin, integration with some popular service, I don’t know. But there must be something.

(And to think that I emailed Jason a couple of days ago saying “I know how to make a better search”! -totaly different approach.)

Looks like Google Analytics is rolling out a new version…

I spent last week at MIX07 (my photos).

The thing that impressed me most is the number of times I heard the word “open” at a Microsoft event. WTF? Is Microsoft embrassing open-* ? And if so, what? Open standards? Open Source?

I have the impression that as their “platform” evolves from the OS to Web Services (providing SLAs for Windows Live is a nice move), they realize that 1) they *can* be more open and 2) they have a lot to win by being more open.

So openness is in the Microsoft agenda. The real question is how high? I mean compared to other attributes, qualities, priorities, like “profitability”, “usabilitty”, “backwards compatibility”, etc, how high is “openness”? This is the real question.