» mybloglog

I was browsing with firefox earlier over at MBL and decided to edit my profile. It was at that point the login screen was forced on me asking me to sign up with my Y! ID or if I didn’t have one the option to create one. I didn’t want to do this so I guess that for as long as my IE7 cookie lasts, I’ll be able to browse about and respond to PM’s and all that stuff. I did use the mass message tool to tell people I was offski and that I could be reached, followed, networked or whatever else you want to call it at, Bumpzee, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Blogcatalog so there thats that.

I just noticed the mybloglog mass message system thing. I don’t like it, it reminds me of that annoying myspace and orkut mass message thing. It is a recipe for spam spam spam and time wasting silly messages just filling up my inbox.

If every member of every community I’m in uses it just once a week, I’m in for a hell of a lot of reading and emailing/deleting.

Anyhow,  of course I had to try the thing out I so I mass messaged my 108 community members to see what they thought about it, I even told them that it was a one time message and apologised in advance too.

Continuing the conversation on your blog

This post isn’t really aimed at the hardcore experienced blogger, its more aimed at those just starting out, people like me in fact. I’m fairly knew to all this and tend to blog from a search centric POV. Whilst its generally true that its search engines that will give most bloggers their traffic, there are nonetheless a variety of other  ways you can drive traffic and build the conversation within your sphere.

Blogging is popular for many reasons. Be it a tool for self expression, a tool for self promotion or just a general communication medium, its a fantastic way to reach out and have a conversation with people with similar interests.

Due to improvements and upgrades to the server architecture that hosts this site, I regret to say that I’ll be discontinuing the mybloglog visitor tracking script.

Ive noticed that the scripts aren’t perfoming how I expect them to and I just don’t really have the time to recode it all so that it works.

I’ll be emailing existing users to advise them soon.

I hope you aren’t too inconvenienced by this, but in its current state it just isn’t really working too well at all. Inaccurate stats are about as useful as a dinghy in a desert.

For those that played, thanks for doing so.

Ok this isn’t what I do, but its something to think about, especially when you have one of those widget things that have sprung up here there and everywhere on your blog.

Only the other week, I noticed that the same guy appeared to be on my blog all of the time. I wondered why, he never posted, just came by and seem to always be there. He doesn’t do it anymore, so maybe he got bored, but it got me thinking as to the hows and the whys and lead me to believe that he probably set up some kind of auto refresh thing.

Seems like mybloglog has had a bad week. I read today over at Andy’s that mybloglog banned a guy named shoemoney for reasons relative to general not very niceiness, at least that must have been their perception. Mr shoe posted a few mblID’s. These can be obtained from user avatars uploaded by mbl users. I use them myself in my mbl tracking script. A reason for banning? No of course not. I think you have to look a little more closely to perhaps begin to understand why.

I’ve developed a little program that will give you a few extra metrics on your MyBlogLog visitors.

If you’d like to use it then just visit this url and follow the instructions.

Its pretty basic, but does offer a couple of features that MBL does not currently.Things like user pageviews, number of visits, last day visited, that kind of thing.

Its completely opt-in, you need to add some code on your webpages in order for it to work. It will only give you stats for visitors who have a mbl account and have opted for stat recording.

I love the recent Y! acquisition, mybloglog. Its like a myspace with bells on. Ive encountered some really nice and interesting people too. In case you haven’t seen or used it before its a social media platform. You can join communities, add contacts, upload photos and if you install a piece of code you can get stats and display photos of visitors from their network on your site as they arrive.

On the user front I think its kinda cool. IMO I think It adds an extra dimension to ones website by way of showing an extra human dimension. You can see the latest faces of people who have visited and if you so feel inclined, go and check them out to see what they are all about; at least thats what Ive found myself doing!

Their stats page is cool too. Gives you a non fussy overview of where your readers came from, what they viewed and what they clicked. It even tells you what ads they clicked on too.