One of the confusing parts about today's internet landscape is the plethora of different sites doing the same things; there isn't just one social bookmarking service, there are many. So many different platforms leads to fragmentation, to the point that it sometimes seems like a wonder that anybody can find each other on the net at all.
Which brings us to the topic of this post. ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us, but with its own unique features as well. One thing that struck me (apart from ma.gnolia's interface, which is simple but more esthetically pleasing than del.icio.us' interface) was the prominence that ma.gnolia gives to groups. Groups (or pools) are a big part of Flickr's interface, but del.icio.us doesn't highlight this aspect at all (unless I just haven't found it yet, which is possible).
Another thing that struck me was that when I created a bookmark, it automatically was given a Creative Commons license. Although I think a lot about copyright and rights management, it never occurred to me that a bookmark might be a unit of information with a license, like a book or photo. Creative Commons is an interesting alternative to standard copyright (which seems to be getting more intrusive and draconian by the hour), but I haven't yet used it for any of my online content (I've been considering it for some of my Flickr photos). In other words, it was a bit of a shock not only to have a license attached to "my" bookmark, but a CC one at that. On the other hand, none of the content in that bookmark, nor the bookmarking technology itself, is mine; the only thing that's mine is my choice of it as significant. Since ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking site, bookmarks are meant to be shared, so a share-alike CC license is an appropriate choice.
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2 comments:
oh man do I agree about fragmentation. I think magnolia looked nice, prompting me to probably use it, but ultimately I would just CONTINUE to use delicious because of its association with Google. Now I don't want Google to "win", but they seem to develop nice stuff, eh?
Didn't even notice the creative commons license ... interesting... maybe I am not thinking, but why would someone need to have protected rights in a someone else's work that they are bookmarking? or is it a copyright of their list of bookmarks als a whole?
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