Scoping out Ma.gnolia a bit today, and I've noticed a few rather famous - and decidedly non-tech geek - people have accounts there. This has me scratching my head a bit: Are these people friends of the site owners? Spontaneous fans of this site's brand of social bookmarking? Paid shills playing the tables? Seeing these sorts of faces showing up at an up-till-now all-alpha-geek party seems a bit suspect to me. It also seems rather non-long-tailed and celeb-attached to me. But then, I'm weird and it could be all on the up and up. The site does look like a brave effort toward making this stuff intentionally more "humane".
Update: Got a nifty response from Todd Sieling of Ma.gnolia, with respect to my Ma.gnolia concerns: You can lay your suspicions to rest. We've been talking with these folks for quite a while both before and through beta, gauging interest and letting them know how social bookmarking can help them engage with their audiences in a new way that is more dynamic than a brochure website. Their appearance at launch was to make launch a bit more special. And, for what it's worth, alpha geeks haven't made up all the early members in Ma.gnolia. Designers, photographers and more casual web users have been part of the mix as well.
Archived Comments
Kinda weird that Ira Glass talks (tags?) about himself in the third-person.
Oh yeah, and there's that! Forgot to mention it - seems like there's a publicist bookmarking for him or something, which kind of rubs in a weird way.
George noticed the same thing as Brett with Alton Brown's bookmarks, as well as the fact that they're all self links.
Well, I have a ma.gnolia account - and uhm, have some self links too. :)
But of course, I am nowhere near as rockin' or scien-tastic as Mr. Brown. Hehheee..
Overall, I'm diggin ma.gnolia - I was able to import all of my del.icio.us stuff with no problems - and have real use for the ability to privatize links, and to create groups [both public and private], so that I can show people at work what social bookmarking is all about - and maybe have it be something that contributes to work on projects...
We'll see. Overall, I'm diggin' it.
I self-link anytime I'm trying to promote an idea that I think is really important. It's the simplest way to pull in attention from outside your normal readship at the moment, and if it's interesting to the people who come in, that kind of outweighs the weirdness of bookmarking yourself I think.
And yeah, I gotta say, I really like Ma.gnolia a lot. They're also running Ruby, IIRC, and that makes me happy.