MyBlogLog.com brings the blogosphere together

Posted 29 January 2007 14:28 by Kristof Michiels

The new ‘MyBlogLog Readers’ widget in the right column deserves an explanation. One of the aspects of the Web these ‘2.0’ days is the fact that online communities have become more fragmented and ephemere. People (readers, bloggers) assembling around a blog (or number of blogs) may form distributed communities overtime, that currently only materialize in the comments people leave in these spaces. And the majority of readers who don’t contribute (the lurkers, what a terrible word!) remain unknown.

To the rescue comes MyBlogLog, a social networking service that aims to bring the shattered blogosphere back together (technorati.com tries the same with a different approach). MyBlogLog helps both blog readers and authors to connect and learn about each other, and helps to build visible communities around the weblogs they prefer and read. In order to do this it tracks the activities of MyBlogLog members on the websites of other members (by means of a piece of javascript code). Members can build a personal profile page, associate themselves with their favorite blogs and send messages to each other. Browsing through the profile pages of likeminded members provides an interesting way to discover new blogs (including those from the long tail). Bloggers can show a widget on their site with pictures of the most recent readers to visit the site (like the one you see here on the right) and can display the most popular outbound links from their blog to another site.

That this is a potential killer application, has rightly been recognised by Yahoo : they acquired Mybloglog a few weeks ago. The service is now part of the Yahoo Developers Network, which is a good thing. It will considerably expand the user base, and with it also the value of the service. Eventually, it seems obvious, users will be able to log in with their Yahoo ID's. I don’t have a clear view on how many people and websites are using the service at the moment. Techcrunch reported last october that MyBlogLog served already 4000 live blog-based communities. Today there are probably many more. Fortunately, there is no advertising on the MyBlogLog website – which deserves, in my humble opinion, a nice design makeover (the colors!). Mybloglog works with a premium-account system that unlocks extra features like better user tracking. Most blog owners however can do all the things they need to do on a free account.

But it’s not all milk and honey. For starters, there is a lot of spam on MyBlogLog, ranging from people ‘overpromoting’ their blog to genuine spam con artists. Some observers, including myself, are concerned about how easily the community can be compromised and abused by spammers. I sincerely hope – although I fear it won't be so easy - that they are going to be able to cope with this problem. In addition, there is definitely a serious privacy issue with MyBlogLog. Once you’ve created an account, MyBlogLog tracks every URL (watched by MyBlogLog) you visit on the web. Unnecesary to say, this could lead to situations. As Marshall Kirkpatrick stated on Techcrunch MyBlogLog really needs to take steps to demonstrate trustworthiness with that information, and put the user in total control of his data. The fact that you can delete your avatar from being displayed on a website is just not enough. A simple browser button plug-in (like the Attention Trust recorder), that allows users to switch off recording the URLs they visit, is definitely a must.

Nevertheless, the MyBlogLog concept is so strong that it deserves to be pursued further. On last thing: I would definitely release an API as soon as possible. I believe it may help to overcome the problems just mentioned. An API offers more flexibility than the widget does at this moment. API users would for instance be able to choose to only display members with an avatar, or members with a blog that have already shown some activity in the community. Other profile information about recent readers could be displayed as well. Of course the middleman could be cut out by immediately displaying the visitor’s own website. But a service with the potential of MyBlogLog shouldn’t be affraid of this.

Update 8-2-07: although i'm still convinced that the concept is great, I'm very much concerned with the spam that I am seeing. This morning I got visits from users called free-apple-iphone and online-pharmacy. Also a lot of users are merely trying to get as much contacts as they possibly can, rendering the Mybloglog concept close to useless. Currently there is no way you can report users as spammers. You can only block them from your site. What Mybloglog does with this information right now, I don't have a clue. They have to tackle this problem soon, that's for sure.