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Social bookmarking: the awkward genius hopes you'll take its ideas to parties for it.

Ma.gnolia, one of the most popular second tier social bookmarking services on the web, announced today at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle that the company has thrown itself to the mercy of the development community and is going to make its code available in open source.

Ma.gnolia is tiny compared to Yahoo's Delicious, but in every way other than network effects, it's more interesting. Unfortunately, that's all pretty academic. When interesting competes with the powerful network effects that come from the huge number of Delicious users - Delicious wins. Today's announcement may help grow Ma.gnolia quickly; at the very least it's a daring move.

I loved tag clouds from the moment I saw them, and I still do. Two years ago, they roamed the social web like buffalo on the pre-Columbian plains of North America... huge, thundering herds of keywords of all shades and sizes. And you'll see them to this day on many of their earliest adopters - from Delicious.com (makeover and all) to 43 Things.

These days, though, I'm noticing that on more and more sites the tag clouds have evaporated. I'm not saying they're dead (okay, granted, that's exactly what the cartoon's saying, but that's why they issue artistic licenses), but they're getting scarcer.

The popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us launched a complete redesign of its service today. Ever since it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, the company added very few new features and the redesign had been rumored to be in the works for almost a year now. The new design and features are mostly focused on enhancing the speed of the service and improving its search capabilities. Del.icio.us can also now be reached at delicious.com and will start using this as its standard URL.

You may have heard of Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that lets you customize the way a web page displays using small bits of Javascript, but are you using it to its fullest potential? There are hundreds of scripts available for installation from userscripts.org, so it can be difficult to know which ones are must-haves.

As soon as the online press got hold of a sliver of information about Yahoo! Buzz, the predictable cries of "Digg clone!" were loud enough to drown out anyone who thought that Yahoo! Buzz might be something more than a lame attempt at socially driven news (without the social elements). While many people think that the flurry of recent launches from Yahoo! represent nothing more than a cry of desperation, I think Yahoo! Buzz, at least, sets itself apart from the rest.

Last May we asked the question, "are social bookmarking sites better at search than Google?" Though some readers questioned our specific methods, our conclusion was that "while social bookmarking and ranking sites don't make great search engines on their own, they offer a wealth of user-vetted data that could be used to augment search results in a positive way." Recently, Yahoo! began testing including del.icio.us data in search results. While it is unclear whether the del.icio.us data is affecting search rankings, the more important question is: would it even matter?