Ma.gnolia is getting even more Social

March 31, 2007 in Applications, Web by Carsten Pötter | 2 comments

MagnoliaSocial bookmarking site Ma.gnolia has quickly become one of my favourite web services since I started using it in January. It is very user friendly and it even got faster; something I complained about back in January.

I wrote that Ma.gnolia was emphasising the social aspects of social bookmarking. Well, even more social features have been added in the meantime. In February Give thanks was introduced. If you see a bookmark someone else added to Ma.gnolia you can give thanks to that person. I think that’s very cool. Often people who bookmark a site first, provide meaningful tags and descriptions which you just copy.  Give thanks to them for discovering a great site and doing all the basic work of bookmarking for you.

Yesterday Gardeners have been added. Like all bookmarking services Ma.gnolia is affected by spam; fighting it is consuming a lot of time. So a very small number of users, the Gardeners, are able to mark users as spammers; those accounts will be invisible for other users and will be marked as NoFollow and NoIndex, so they are also invisible to search engines. Gardeners can invite another user to be a Gardener as well. Sounds like a plan.

Some people will probably argue that Ma.gnolia just lets its users do the work. Well, I see Ma.gnolia as a community, not as a company which is trying to make millions of Dollars on the backs of its users. I might be proved wrong someday but I don’t think I actually will.

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  1. Todd Sieling’s avatar

    Todd Sieling on April 1, 2007 at 19:24

    Thanks for writing about the Gardeners program, Carsten. We’re definitely not looking to ‘crowd-souce’ spam control, and I hope the small number (4, plus Larry and myself) of people we’ve asked to be Gardeners shows that. Our main concern is having human eyes make judgments rather than trying to build the perfect spam-trap.

    We hope Gardeners won’t see their role as work, but as another way to participate in the community that they help build and maintain by being leaders there.

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on April 1, 2007 at 19:45

    Todd, Gardeners is great idea. I think those people will happily help fighting spam. It’s their community after all.