ma.gnolia

Citizen Garden is a site of Factory Joe's (I think) who usually does pod casts, but this time he posted a Vimeo session with Larry Halff, the creator of ma.gnolia. For those who do not know, ma.gnolia recently had significant data corruption, and being a site to upload, store and share links with groups or communities, this was a serious crash.
Two significant ideas (among many others) come from the 25 minute video. The first is how a single individual with an interesting idea can create a substantial global community with the tools available today. But the second point is that if a single person can create a site which appears to be run by an organization, because there is no transparency with the site, how do we safeguard against significant disruption of life when the person does not properly backup the site or system, as in the case of ma.gnolia? Should it be mandatory to have transparency in all community based websites?

In the video:

Citizen Garden discussing ma.gnolia's downfall.
Ma.gnolia was developed by a cultural anthropologist as a collaborative qualitative research tool. The site appeared to be a large corporation but it was only Larry with some help from up to 4 other people. Ma.gnolia is testimony that

An individual can build a substantial community with the tools available today...

but it raises a question about our dependence on data storage in the cloud.

If your email went away, what would you
do?

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

Link to the Citizen Garden Site:

http://citizengarden.com/2009/02/15/episode-11-whither-magnolia/