In ancient times, say 1998, when the internet was young and dumb and full of you know what, the web was somewhat limited.
Sure, you could buy books online, you could e-mail your friends, but finding really good information was somewhat of a coin flip. Usually, when you searched for, say, “html best practices,” you’d get a search result that basically told you how cute girls wearing hardly anything where dying to tell you, while they where taking off the hardly anythings and doing questionable things with tropical fruit, exactly what to do with the best html practices, and how much they loved you for it.
Fun diversion, for sure, but darn it all, at the time, I would think, “How come my friends always tell me they find these really good sites with all the information I need about html, or sneakers, or how to train a cat, or the best way to create an independent movie, or the latest news on the political climate in the Midwest, or how to make cheese? How come they find it, and I can’t? How can the web be more about real things?”
Well web technology enthusiasts, companies and pundits have been promising for years about how the web will evolve to a more user driven, or people driven, or whatever cool term they had back in the late 90’s, early 00’s (goose eggs, for the funny names group) driven.
It could be that the promise has of late to pass.
Like a brand new baby with a PhD, here comes Web 2.0 and social bookmarking. And one of the cutest babies of the bunch is also one of my favorites, Ma.gnolia.
Your first stop at ma.gnolia is usually the only stop you need. In all honesty, I was introduced to ma.gnolia from Matt Cutt’s post on Web 2.0 . I know, I know, the phrase “Web 2.0” is sooooo two months ago, but it’s an interesting meme at least, and certainly applies to a web…uhmm…thing like ma.gnolia.
Is it a service? Is it a site? Is it a search engine? Is a community? Is it a directory? I’ll tell you what I think.
Yes.
Well, what else do you want me to say? Mrs. Rumblepup always has a way to make me feel dumb when I’m trying to elucidate on the finer points of potpourri, a topic that does not mix well with my more masculine chemicals, but I’m trying. And the fact is that ma.gnolia, and sites that try to be like it are a new thing that really doesn’t include a history of mechanical know-how.
It’s kinda like a brand new, bad ass mustang that uses solar power instead of a beast 8 cylinder engine. It’s cool as hell, but hard to talk about the cool man stuff under the hood, ‘cause none of your man friends have every seen a solar powered engine before.
How can I relate it? What does it have to do with SEO and SEM? Who invented liquid soap, and why?
So what does a poor rumblepup do? How can a simple rumblepup get the answers these questions (maybe not the one about liquid soap) deserve?
Well, rumblepup goes to the man who helped start it all. I asked Larry Halff, the founder of ma.gnolia, if I can ask him my brand of dumb questions and he said yes.
I’m like, “Dude, you’re gonna love my new mustang!”
He said, “Cool, is it solar powered?”
How, much better can it get?
rumblepup –
Hello señor!
Larry Halff –
Hola!
rumblepup –
In your own words, what is ma.gnolia?
Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is a tool for organizing your online life. We often think about organizing our lives as a highly personal thing, and it is in some respects. But our online lives involve a lot of collaboration and personalities, and we give those aspects of online life as much emphasis as we do to the simple bookmarking and sharing. So yes, you can find bookmarks to good web sites on all sorts of subjects, but it’s as much about who is behind those finds, and putting a human face on sharing information.
rumblepup –
You had some pretty heavy hitters help develop ma.gnolia. What was it like working with them?
Larry Halff –
We were really fortunate to work with the people we did in our original design. Happy Cog , led by Jeffrey Zeldman, took on the project and delivered not only a stunning visual brand, but a superbly implemented set of HTML and CSS templates for us to build on. We found working with Jeffrey’s team very interactive while being practical and getting results quickly and regularly, right down to the last pixel.
rumblepup –
What is the underlying technology behind ma.gnolia? Why did you choose to go with that as opposed to asp.net, or php, or other, newer technologies out there?
Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is built in Ruby on Rails. It’s a sensible, enjoyable platform for us to develop in, and a happy developer is a productive developer. As we all know, you can find a ton of arguments about what is the best platform, so I won’t rehash that. Ruby on Rails just happens to be the best one for us.
rumblepup –
When I’m using ma.gnolia, I like to go thumbing around the tag clouds. I usually find just what I’m looking for there, or something incredibly interesting. The best part about this is that this is pretty trustworthy content; Reason being that someone has found a really good source of information, a cool “thing”, or cool “on the clock time waster” and I trust the content.
Are you watching how ma.gnolia users actually use the service? Are people using ma.gnolia as a SE?
Larry Halff –
Sometimes…
A lot of what people do in Ma.gnolia does start with using it as a resource for new or forgotten links. But because we also focus on the social aspect, we see people following the bookmarks and tags of others in the community who catch their interest. That ability to discover and share through relationships brings out the third aspect of the service and the one we’re still building, which is to do interesting things with the information you organize in Ma.gnolia and the people you know.
rumblepup –
In the search for IBL’s, web marketers have found social bookmarking. However, spammers have as well. On ma.gnolia, I have found a couple of users that post a bunch of links to the same site. But it seems to me that the community “effect” is that these bookmarks quickly gets lost in the background. They might get a little IBL, but there marks are so down the food-chain, that the SE’s might never find them. I know that your team has had some serious discussions and work-ups to handle spamming, but the real question is this; in this community setting, how do you know what spam is? Is someone who’s listing their T-shirt site, because he/she believes it to be a good source, gonna get smacked upside the head for posting it, just because it’s a personal or commerce site?
Is their anything wrong with posting a site under the pre-text of “look at this really cool thing I did?”
Larry Halff –
The line isn’t as fine as it might seem. We think it’s great that people use Ma.gnolia to make their creations known to the world and to keep others up to date on their own happenings.
When you see bookmarks with completely unrelated (but popular) tags, you’re obviously in spam country, and at that point we feel confident in taking action.
rumblepup –
You guys have a pretty standard T&C (Terms and Conditions for those playing along) but basically, as a person signs up, you pretty much tell them that they are free to post, comment, and add to ma.gnolia to their liking, just be cool and nice about it. Did I get this basic feeling right? Is the democratic nature of ma.gnolia self governing?
Larry Halff –
You have the basic feeling exactly right.
Ma.gnolia isn’t democratic in the sense that we have a voting system, but the value of Ma.gnolia is created by its members through their bookmarks, comments, additions to our support wiki , and so on.
We try to create easy paths to different ways of discovering and sharing for all kinds of reasons. Where we do that right, people come and do interesting things.
rumblepup –
Do you see ma.gnolia as an evolution of social bookmarking, or do you see the success of ma.gnolia as an evolution of the web?
Larry Halff –
I’m not a big fan of the term “social bookmarking.” I don’t think most people are passionate about bookmarks. We’re passionate about the information we bookmark and what we can learn and create from the things we bookmark. Ma.gnolia’s development is driven by the results people can achieve with the information they save, we’re not trying to build a better database application.
rumblepup –
Ok, since your site is touted as a best example of what Web 2.0 is, let me ask you. What the heck is Web 2.0 and where does ma.gnolia fit in?
Larry Halff –
I’m sure I’m starting to sound aloof, but Ma.gnolia isn’t intentionally participating in the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
We’re trying to build a great productivity tool for our members, and along the way some of our techniques intersect with what is called Web 2.0.
Or, to put it another way, Ma.gnolia is not going to be the next YouTube.
rumblepup –
So, why ma.gnolia and not just gnolia, or magnolia, or one whole word? Do you guys have del.ico.us envy?
Larry Halff –
The name mostly comes from the movie, Magnolia by PT Anderson. If you haven’t seen it, it involves a number of complex story lines that crisscross in unexpected ways, and show us different sides to characters and their stories. We look at our experience on the web like this, the way our knowledge evolves by clicking from one place to another, it grows like a flower.
If we could have grabbed magnolia.com we would have, for sure. However, that URL is owned by a big oil company and we didn’t have much hope, so we did the next best thing and dropped a dot in the middle.
rumblepup –
Do you visit, or partake, in any of the other competing social bookmarking or social network sites? Do you think there is room for healthy competition?
Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is the only one I use; don’t spend much time checking out other services. Ma.gnolia isn’t intentionally competing with them for market share. We’re trying to build the right tool for our members, and we figure that when people come to us, they know whether we’re right for them. Our success is not tied to being the biggest; it’s tied to providing the most value for our members.
rumblepup –
When did you first discover the web? What where your thoughts on it back then and now?
Larry Halff –
I first started using the web as a graduate student in 1992 or 1993 with a Mac version of WorldWideWeb. I have to admit, there wasn’t a whole lot out there to see back then, Usenet newsgroups where were the action was at.
What I find most interesting about the evolution of the Internet is how we’re trying to find a balance between always connected computing, the mainframe and terminal paradigm, and independent personal computing, which perhaps reached it’s peak with desktop publishing and image editing.
rumblepup –
When did you put up your first website? What was it?
Larry Halff –
I think my first web site was for my graduate school research lab, MERLin, the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab at the University of British Columbia. Back then I was working on a qualitative video analysis tool called Constellations. We even prototyped a web-based version, which was very much like a social bookmarking service.
rumblepup –
If I put a gun to your head, what was the dumbest user tag you’ve ever seen used? What was the smartest?
Larry Halff –
Well I don’t think we see ‘dumb’ tags. People tag the words and phrases that are on their mind when they bookmark a site, so it’s about what’s meaningful to them. You see clever, sometimes funny tags like ‘tales of interest’ but you also see inspiring ones that call for people to act on a story or event that is bookmarked. One of my favorite uses of tags is choosing a particular tag for an event; it gives us a great way to gather photo, bookmarks, and blog posts from all of the different services people choose to use.
rumblepup –
Ok, now, for the real big question. What’s your favorite Sid and Marty Krofft Show?
Larry Halff –
H.R. Puffinstuff. Who can deny that theme song?
rumblepup –
I know what you mean. Somedays, I just can’t get that song out of my head. Those are the days Mrs. Rumblepup rubs my head and checks our insurance book for psychiatric coverage. Poor girl, she still doesn’t fathom my inner genius.
Who do you think was the coolest star?
Larry Halff –
Sigmund. What’s not to love about a conical sea monster!
rumblepup –
Yeah, I loved that show. Always wondered how he talked though. His mouth just puffed in and out.
But I always had a soft spot for Joy from The Bugaloos.
Even as a six year old, I knew she was hot.
..
..
And as I’m writing this, I feel the cold stare of Mrs. Rumblepup on my back. You guessed it, bad news is coming. Gotta go.
Many thanks to Larry Halff from Ma.gnolia.
Until next time.
rumblepup.
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