One of my friends on Twitter was talking about how Jason Calacanis was showing people the Mahalo offices. On a lark, I decided to join in and view the live video. What it turned into was something I never expected.

Someone on the live chat on Qik asked Calacanis if any of the pages on Mahalo-a people-powered search engine-ever showed up on the front page of Digg. So what did Jason Calacanis do? In auctioneer style, he got people to digg a piece on the Best Evil Robots. You can digg it yourself, if you'd like. He also got people to blog it, which even I did.

What's the point of this story? As I learned last week and saw yet another example of yesterday, Qik is a powerful, game-changing tool. It uses voice, video, and text over IP to create a very powerful, live experience using a Nokia N95 and either 3G or WiFi. While clearly people using Qik are broadcasting, Qik gives the broadcaster a backchannel so he can see what people are saying. I witnessed how this worked first hand, and it was amazing!