A tale about falling in and out of love with ma.gnolia.com

On February 3rd, 2009 Henriette Weber wrote:

Since friday the 30. of January the place where I have choosen to store all my bookmarks has been down. According to their Twitter account, ma.gnolia.com had severe failure. Which was okay for a day or two, but by now Im kinda wondering if I will ever see what I think is about 3 years of bookmarks again. Im pretty pissed about that to say the least. I have even wondered to myself "why oh why I have ever putted my bookmarks on the internet" - and "why oh why I didn't stay on del.icio.us".
Ma.gnolia had a lot of charm for me, and where a really interesting tool to use for open knowledge sharing within a company.

I am using my bookmarks everyday for research and benchmarking and best casestudies. I don't know if I will be able to access my "knowledge bank of expertise goods" which used to be my magnolia account.

They lost it - or so it seems.

I trusted their service so much - and I also thought that they had really great backup of our data, but I guess not.

Now in my current mood of "pissed off ness" I am sure that they have brought miscredit to all of the internet - from my point of view because I don't believe I will be able to trust an online service again - not without having it all backed up at home.

If I face it, there's a lot of those bookmarks that are not that important (a lot of them are - but probably 70 % I could live without).
But I would never be able to use ma.gnolia again - also because of their way of communicating to their users - which has almost non-existent. The value in my bookmarks is extremely high. I wanted to know the day after the failure that I would probably not see my bookmarks again.

Bottomline is: I wont be able to trust the internet with my data without having most of it backup at home.  I can't believe that they could loose my data. I don't think my trust in social network and services will ever be regained. At least not in services where I store data that is actually that valuable to my work and my daily life.

[magnolia, ma.gnolia.com, bookmarks, data, trust, security, communication, badwill] [6 comments]

newsletters ? about yourself or about the industry ?

On August 22nd, 2008 Henriette Weber wrote:

There needs to be a fair amount of well lets call it "selfinsight" in a company. But when you do something like, let's say, send out an extraordinary newsletter with the only purpose of announcing stuff about yourself ( aka. giving no value to the readers) - I just think you are wasting my time.

I want to talk about value here.  I want to have value from receiving your newsletter, personal or professional - it has to give something to me.  Otherwise I probably won't let myself have your news and sign up for a mailinglist if I thought that all I would get from it was noise.

I mean - if  you send out a newsletter out,  talking about the value of yourself instead of giving value to your readers, there's a fair ammount of chance that the newsletter will end up as badwill instead of goodwill.

so newsletters doesn't necessarily have to evolve news about yourself, it could evolve news about - lets say, your area of experience?

[business, communication, newsletter, badwill, value] [114 comments]