Friday 20 June 2008

KIN Bookmarks

And now, for my next WEB 2.0 KIN experiment, I have set up a "KIN Bookmarks" group on social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia.com.

This is something I have been considering for a while but was finally inspired into action by the KIN Quarterly workshop which I co-facilitated yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed the day: the presentations, the member case studies and the networking opportunities.
(For KIN members, all the material presented at the workshop and more besides can be found in the Quarterly workshop site on the memberspace - this site will be being updated over the next few days)

During one presentation, I was reminded that during a visit to a member organisation internal forum the previous week, I overheard one person there commenting that they had learnt one new thing: they had never before heard of 'Social Bookmarking' but were now going to try it. So I wondered if there were people in our audience that also had never heard of Social Bookmarking. (Or some of the other tools mentioned such as RSS. When I posted a poll in the memberspace, I did get a few people saying they had never heard of RSS)

So first of all, a link to one of my favourite sites, The Common Craft show:
Social Bookmarking in Plain English



And for those of you who would like to have a go:
I decided to use Ma.gnolia because it allowed me to set up as a moderated group where contributors can be restricted to KIN members. So everytime I create a bookmark using Ma.gnolia I can send it to the KIN Bookmarks group. And better still, so can you !
First, create a Ma.gnolia account (if you don't already have one). Then click on the 'join' button at http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/KIN to join the group. That will make you a member (anyone can see this group and become a member). Then send me an email telling me you would like to contribute to the group and (provided you are a KIN member) I will make you a moderator so that you can.

You can see how I am using Ma.gnolia (not very much - yet!) at: http://ma.gnolia.com/people/PhilRidout

So have a go, and let me know what you think !

2 comments:

Gary Colet said...

Phil,
I'm a great believer in social software needing to be completely intuitive if it is to gain traction. I tried signing up for magnolia and got tied in knots (Yahoo IDs and other seemingly unnecessary security stuff). Eventually I gave up. Just as I gave up on Delicious. Sorry.

philridout said...

Hi Popsarmchair,
I am sorry you had problems signing up. The intention is that signing up to Ma.gnolia should be simple because you can use an existing account userid and password as authentication (Yahoo, Facebook etc or an OpenID account) rather than creating a whole new set of details. This is what they say on their help page:
"At Ma.gnolia, we think we all have too many website passwords to remember. Each new account with a new password is one more to remember, and one more that can be forgotten.

Ma.gnolia lets you join by using an existing identity from a website you already know and trust, like Facebook, Yahoo! or WordPress. You tell us the service to use and your ID (a name or URL), and that service will verify you and will never show your password to Ma.gnolia. After joining, you can use that same account to sign into Ma.gnolia. Spammers hate it; good, honest folks love it!

No new password, using a service you already trust. Join Ma.gnolia by signing in, and enjoy a safer and easier web."

Of course, if you don't have one of the Identities that they accept then you are required to create one. It's a pity that they don't make this more clear.

I am hopeful that one day all sites will accept OpenID, obviating the need to remember multiple userid and password combinations, so would recommend trying this if you don't already have an account with one of the other listed services