Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Roots by Ma.gnolia

Roots connects you with the Ma.gnolia community as you browse the web. It’s an idea that’s profoundly simple: when you’re looking at a website, click the Roots bookmarklet and see what the Ma.gnolia community thinks of that site.

So this morning, I was lead to a new feature in the social bookmarking site, Ma.gnolia that I find both interesting and useful. The feature is called Roots and it’s essentially a javascript overlay for whatever site or article you are browsing on the web. The overlay provides you with community data from Ma.gnolia. Now the data is just from other Ma.gnolia users and not the web at large, but still if the page has been rated, you get a rating between 1 and 5, along with a count of users who have rated it (so you know its not a 5 based off a single rating). You’ll get who bookmarked it first; when it was bookmarked, what tags have been used to describe it; as well as comments and or summaries provided by Ma.gnolia users.

All in all, this is a significant amount of detail to make rapid decisions on things like trust and relevancy. But even better, it provides you with some opportunities to share (aka officially promote a piece) without spamming or using other frowned upon practices.

Additionally you can use the feature to make rapid comparisons. Want to send the NTEN site up in a face-off against NetSquared? You can now do so. The comparison is not statistically significant; but could lead the designer/developer of either site to adjust meta tags for summaries, descriptions, etc. To increase relevancy to related tags. Take a look…

Here are my original thoughts from Twitter (conversation reads from bottom to top)

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