MyBlogLog experiments
I received another one of those ubiquitous MyBlogLog emails from a "contact".
Check it! megite has made you a contact on TechCrunch. Click below to visit their profile, where you can learn more about them and add them as a contact as well. community.techcrunch.com/members/megite/
Techcrunch? Notice MyBlogLog sits embedded within this special Techcrunch domain http://community.techcrunch.com/ together with the Techcrunch branding and menu bar.
The co-branded MyBlogLog functions exactly like the original MyBlogLog... which begs the question, co-branding MyBlogLog for every blog would be redundantly ridiculous. I can see how Techcrunch and a few select others might benefit traffic-wise from the co-branded site, but it's all gratuitous traffic derived from MyBlogLog users (and pretty much has little to do with Techcrunch). I googled "MyBlogLog Co-branded Communities" for more insight into how this new product might work... ProBlogger has an article on the co-brand... most of the proponents see it as a feature to retain viewers, too.
Conclusion: MyBlogLog is going to be doing a lot of experimenting to find the right formulas and features that will make its presence ubiquitous among blogs... I didn't get MyBlogLog when I first discovered it because I was thinking it was a reader-focused social networking app that would interface readers with blogs. I now realize that the social networking niche it primarily addresses is the network of bloggers...
ADDENDUM: SoloSEO has developed an interesting set of additional MyBlogLog tools that expands on the analysis of MBL visitors to your blog. Many of the tools compare visitors between two contacts or communities (another pet peeve is the dual exercise of adding both the contact and community of the contact to reinforce the MBL link... there's one tool that finds your community members that you've missed adding to your contacts).
related:
ProBlogger - Feb 9, 07 - MyBlogLog Co-branded Communities
Blog Critics Magazine - Jan 24, 07 - MyBlogLog Integrates Flickr Features: Is A Social Networking Powerhouse For Bloggers On the Rise?
Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, Techcrunch, web 2.0, social networking, blogging
Here's the thing that annoys me: the search function now lists results by alphabetical order instead of ordered by number of subscribers. Type in "real estate" and A1A1MySpaceRealEstateBlog would be at the top, and the Zillow blog would be buried at the end of four hundred or so listings.
More democratic, perhaps, but less useful for the user. Plus - this will simply encourage users to give their blogs alphabetically advantageous titles.
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The ProBlogger article has a lot of suggestions for the features MyBlogLog might add or could improve on. I agree searching on MyBlogLog is a complete waste of time...
Frankly, in my estimation, the MyBlogLog network is simple to maintain, it takes seconds to reciprocate linking with contacts after checking them out for another minute. So it's not time consuming, but on the other hand, the site's value in finding interesting blogs becomes devalued with all that gratuitous linkage.
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I'm still trying to sort out MyBlogLog and the community vs. contact thing wasn't very intuitive. I liked the SoloSEO tools, thanks for pointing it out.
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Thx for the ping Ben... with these SoloSeo internet tools, you can hide your MBL avatar thing and still see who's checking out your site...
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I didn't really get MyBlogLog before either, but it seems to help us connect with each other. At first, I thought it was great to let anyone and everyone become a "contact" but now I am far more selective which seems to work better for me. If you use the tool wisely you can make some excellent contacts. However the one aspect of it that truly annoys me is that plugin with the recent visitor avatars- slows sites down considerably. I will be looking forward to how they grow their presence and create the value proposition for users.
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Thanks Mary... I always follow your advice and have pulled that avatar plugin. I do notice that as much as 4% of mytraffic is coming from MyBlogLog so it may be working for marketing outside the real estate industry.
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Heya -- thanks for the post about us. A couple of things to point out:
* Cobranded commnuities is not our way of retaining users; in fact, it's just the opposite. There are loads of sites that would love to use MyBlogLog but don't want to send all their users to a separate site for their community. This is our way to let people take advantage of what we do without worrying about losing their brand.
* Sorting alphabetically is out of pure necessity. We're at a point where sorting by size was taking down our servers. We need to optimize that data and then the sort will be back to how it was.
* Just because you are friends with someone doesn't mean you visit their site regularly, and just because you read someone's blog doesn't mean you know them personally. The dual nature of contact vs community is key in enabling people to find more accurate data about who they should check out and what they should be reading. Do you have ideas on how we could make this more effective?
* Lastly -- slowdown. It KILLS us that this is happening. Thankfully it's an infrequent event due to suck-ass reliability from our hosting provider. Almost all of our resources are dedicated to moving us onto Yahoo!'s infrastructure, at which point we'll likely be the fastest thing on your page
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Thank you for showing up Eric!
I understand your cobranded communities are for the benefit of your client base, and see how it creates a kind of MBL garden community within the site.
Thanks for explaining the contact/community dynamic... what I believe happens, at least in my case, is the contact and community become one for the purposes of networking. It would probably be useful to have a "add contact and join community" button when that networking link is made.
That SoloSeo tool list really does a great job in taking advantage of some of the networking data that MBL culls... it provides playability... in the future, you can add mashups to provide visuals of how the networks are linked and even maps on where the blogs are located. You can see I'm impressed with MBL's completely original data set based on blogger networks that could be effectively applied to commercial opportunities as diverse as targeted media buying (blogs as advertisement vehicles) to new media networks.
That's what makes MyBlogLog such a puzzle at first glance, who'd have thought a network could be constructed almost solely from a population subset called "bloggers". I can see a bit more clearly how social networking will play out in the future and this will be the theme of part 2 of MyBlogLog article...
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