DianaTan.net

There are so many technologies on the internet and different names it behooves me to name them all. Some of them you may be familiar like Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves which are the better known search engines. While these play important roles in our lives where the internet is concerned, there are others that are not so popular and relatively unheard of.

You may be wondering what Ma.gnolia is. To understand Ma.gnolia completely, let’s begin with a story called “And on the First Day, There was Search.” Really, on the first day there was just one web page. Then there were two, and a link was made between them. Before long, there were lots of web pages, with many links between them, and suddenly we needed specialized web sites to help us find other web sites. And the term ‘search engine’ became part of our new web vocabulary. What an impact those search engines made.

But things are different now. Even the best search engines can’t always be sure of what you want to find in the thousands of pages it finds on every search. And with so many pages, searching has been getting tough. Websites can be misleading about what content they really hold or how good they are. Search engines are just software. What if a person could look at every page on the internet and make sure it showed up only in the right searches? Sounds nice, but wouldn’t we all have to pay hundreds of dollars a month just to search?

But that’s exactly what Ma.gnolia does. This is the place where members save websites as bookmarks, just like in their browser. Except with a twist - they also “tag” them and assign labels that make them easy to find again. So when you search for something, you use words that people choose and look only at websites that people think are worth saving. Suddenly you have access to a human-organized bookmark collection that numbers in the millions, but is as easy to use as a search engine.

With Ma.gnolia, that’s really all the work you have to do. Finding by tags makes organizing bookmarks a thing of the past. Since it’s a website, your Ma.gnolia bookmark collection can be reached by you and your friends from anywhere, any time. Also, Ma.gnolia can import bookmark collections from popular browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera 9 and Internet Explorer, as well as from Del.icio.us. However, bookmark importing and exporting can only work for signed-in members.

There are some support and useful tools in this site. You can find the The Ma.gnolia Tutorial, Community Wiki, FAQ, Bookmarklets for marking new sites from your browser, Add-Ons Directory, Ma.gnolia API Documentation and Mirrored API Documentation. In summary, Ma.gnolia is just another new search engine with other features for bookmarking, tagging and labeling. If you find the features interesting, why not check it out and you may find yourself using Ma.gnolia soon. Different strokes for different folks.

In terms of Web 2.0 the in-thing for web technology for today, OriginalSignal actually is a site displaying the latest in 15 different blogs featuring Mashable, TechCrunch, Solution Watch, 37 signals, GigaOM, eHub, Museum of Modern Betas, ProgrammableWeb, BuzzShout, Web 2.0 List and The Web 2.0 Show. As an aside, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch had some tiff with PayPerPost, with mud slinging but finally admitted that there is something that PayPerPost did right by making it compulsory to make bloggers disclose in their blogs of paid posts and to add in the Disclosure Policy.

By the way, the guys behind OriginalSignal are Peter van der Noord, Patrick Huisinga, Tako Steinz, Gert Goet and the headquarters is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Rafe Needleman from CNet wrote about it and also Brian Benzinger from Solutionwatch: How should they call sites like Original Signal? So far these are the names hitting the Web at the moment such as

With no software to download, OriginalSignal is like a site of the different technology webs or blogs put together. As stated in the acknowledgement at the bottom, “All credits go to the authors of these sites. Without their hard work OriginalSignal would not exist.” Well, basically that statement speaks for what OriginalSignal is all about. Under the “Web” tab, it has fuchsia funky pink header color for “Web 2.0” sub-topics, to navy blue header for “Digg”, autumn green for “Buzz”, maroon red for “15 blogs” and forest green for “Search”. The various colors certainly make OriginalSignal site interesting. For your information, the search text box is powered by Yahoo! Many people have thought of Yahoo! as a search engine, but it is more of a search directory.

As for the “Technology” tab, you can find sub-topics for non other than Tech, Apple and Gadgets. Original Signal also has the “World” tab with sub-topics for News Headlines, Politics, Sports and finally Science. This caters to a wider range of readers especially those who wish to be updated with the latest news. For the business men, the “Business “ tab at the top has sub-topics for Finance, Marketing and Jobs. And lastly, the Entertainment tab has sub-topics for Movies, Games and Videos. In a nutshell, OriginalSignal caters to readers from all walks of life, from the young to the matured, from students to working professionals and even retirees.

There are several features that I like at the top left corner of icons such as view the most popular signals in the last 24 hours, change the order of the weblogs, grab the rss-feed for this signal, share this signal with others, get the widget for this signal, view this signal on your mobile phone, view more headlines and change the font size. With so many interesting features, I guess during my free time, I will certainly check this site out for more information as OriginalSignal looks inviting.