Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on. It's nice to get started, but you really want something like Mahalo Answers that brings back a core group of folks over and over again to do something virtuous--like helping each other.

Syndicating tech headlines to a tech blog does actually help people. Also, syndicating the questions you've asked/answered with our Mahalo Answers widget also helps folks.

Also, I've never claimed we are so much innovative as practical. We really just try to do the simple thing: provide folks with the content, links and Q&A they want. The big win of Mahalo will be if we save a lot of people a LOT of time and keep them safe.

That being said the system is fairly advanced running on things like hadoop, nginx, memecache, etc.

Also, the idea of putting a virtual currency with knowledge exchange has never been done. If it works we will have done something fairly historic: created a currency for knowledge. That really hasn't been done before. I've been around the world in the last two years looking at virtual currency and knowledge exchange in places like Korean, China and Japan and the truth is folks are using it for games 99% of the tim e (the other 1% is virtual gifts).

We're the ONLY people to have ever put a currency on a knowledge exchange. That's fairly innovative from what folks have told me.... in fact some fairly intelligent folks have called it very innovative to brilliant.

.... time will tell I guess. :-)

all the best, Jason

ps - if anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers signup and send me your account name (or post the URL here) and I'll send you M$5 to spend.