Ma.gnolia Is Coming

As you may know, one of the tasks Emily assigned to me this semester was to pick a social bookmarking site to host the program links. After casually looking at a few options, it came down to Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia. They're both free, popular and relatively well established as social bookmarking sites. In the end, I suggested Ma.gnolia for a couple of reasons.

• Visually, it's more appealing.
• The are many different RSS feed options available including simple feeds that only list the title of the website and more advanced feeds that include a thumbnail glimpse at the website. Additionally, all the coding is already written out for you.
• The content of the main page of the bookmarked site is saved so even if the site disappears, you should be able to access the content of that original page to see what was once there.
• Bookmarks can be rated from one to five stars. If there is a site we feel is especially good, it can be stressed with these ratings.
• It's more social. While Del.icio.us has networks, Ma.gnolia has groups. Groups consist of many different users adding bookmarks into a common area. The great thing about groups is that more than one user can rate the bookmarks. Theoretically, the bookmarks could be opened to ratings by professors and students. Right now, there will be only one user account but starting in Ma.gnolia will make the transition to a group easier should that route be chosen.
• Different tags are separated by commas when they're being entered. For instance, if I were to add tags to this blog in Ma.gnolia, I could have a tag "Rasmussen College Library." If I were to enter that same tag in De.licio.us, Rasmussen, College and Library would be considered three different tags. If I wanted all of that information in one tag, I'd have to write RasmussenCollegeLibrary.

Those aren't the only benefits to Ma.gnolia but they are a few of the main reasons I chose it over Del.icio.us. It's not without its faults. It can be slow. It also doesn't have the user generated additional applications like Del.icio.us does. Still, I think it'll work well for Rasmussen College links.

I know you guys are having a webinar introducing you to Ma.gnolia if you aren't already aware of how it works. I don't want to repeat too much of what you'll cover tomorrow so I will just leave you with a link to a written tutorial on Ma.gnolia's site.

Ma.gnolia tutorial

Add-Ons:

Here is a link sto Ma.gnolia's page of draggable boomarks to add to the browser. The link they provide here only gives you a link to bookmark a page. It does not take you to your links.