sean.blog

Ma.gnolia has released a new tool, called Roots, which allows you to quickly get information about the page you are viewing from Ma.gnolia. The goal is to put all the great social information that the Ma.gnolia users have collected, and make it available in context. Roots starts as a bookmarklet, which you drag to your toolbar and click when you are viewing pretty much any web page. The Roots interface overlays the web page you were viewing and lets you see information about the site such as the number of stars the site has been given, tags that were used, and the notes that others have used to describe the site. If you want you can then bookmark the site, or add it to a Ma.gnolia group. I have started “Rooting” sites before I bookmark them to get a feel for the types of tags that have been used, and to see what others think.

Roots does have a few little annoyances that will hopefully be worked out. If the page you are looking at uses frames you cannot view the Roots for that page. There are also some strange page changes when you view additional information. For example, when you want to view more of the comments the nice overlay goes away and the Roots page is actually loaded in the browser. I really like the look of the overlay, and hope that the developers at Ma.gnolia can work on getting everything to work in the overlay.

Still, this is a very nicely implemented feature, and again helps to differentiate Ma.gnolia from the rest of the Social Bookmarking crowd. You can read more about Roots on the Ma.gnolia blog. I appreciate the opportunity that the Ma.gnolia team gave me to beta test the tool. I hope everyone likes it, I have had fun playing with it for the past few weeks. I have added a new sidebar item under my list of recent bookmarks which you can click on to see the roots page for my site.