SMX Social: Mahalo To Do Microformats, Search Wikia Adds Alpha 0.2 Features & More

Apr 23, 2008 at 12:31pm ET by Danny Sullivan

News from the first day of our SMX Social Media Marketing conference. Mahalo is now doing microformats as a way to enhance its search results and allow local businesses to be added to your address book. Wikia Search has gone to "Alpha 0.2" with new features. And other conference coverage, below.

Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Jimmy Wales of Wikia Search, and Steven Marder of Eurekster all spoke at the end of the day on our Social Search: The Human Challengers panel. Lisa Barone provides live blogging coverage in her Keynote – Social Search: The Human Challengers post at the Bruce Clay blog.

During that session, Jason shared that Mahalo is providing microformat support. Mahalo Adds Microformats from Mahalo’s Sean Percival covers how this works, complete with screenshots. Check it out! See also further discussion on Techmeme.

Also during the session, Jimmy Wales shared that Wikia Search has added several new features as part of a new alpha release, one he dubbed "Alpha 0.2." Wikia Search doesn’t seem to have news up yet on its own site, but Wikia Search Launches Major Enhancements to Search Alpha from CenterNetworks covers how you can do things like preview pages and copy sections of them into search results. You can also add related search terms to queries, add pages you think should be added to a search result, and delete material you think doesn’t belong.

Scary, freaky? You bet — but Jimmy also covered how, like Wikipedia, the history of all this can be seen, which potentially provides some self-policing. Try the new features on the test site here. And further discussion can be found on Techmeme.

For other session coverage from the conference, see:

Social Media Marketing Essentials, BruceClay.com
Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites, BruceClay.com
Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites, BruceClay.com
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking, BruceClay.com

We’ll also do a Day 2 post tomorrow with further coverage and add to it anything we’ve missed. Also, you can keep up with live blogging both at the Bruce Clay blog and via Twitter. Yep, Twitter. Michael Gray is diligently microblogging on our SMX twitter account.

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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