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.
The reasons behind Mr shoes ban seem to have their roots in him posting various exploits that can be applied and used to basically, fuck with how mbl works. I don’t think this is a bad thing generally, in fact its good to have people point out flaws; especially when they can be patched with relative ease. Constructive criticism is always good.Its a delicate balance though, if someone took it upon themselves to attack and criticise with regularity, posting things that made me look dumb or stupid then my gut might be inclined to say hey do me a favour blokey, just piss off out of it if you don’t like what I am doing. That would of course ( as appears to be panning out to be the case) , be a mistake as I’d open myself to all kinds of attacks from followers, detractors and cronies.
John Andrews nails it with his comment at Andy Beals.
wow… it’s amazing to see so many users adopting our service so fast. We are really excited to see the validation that the MBL platform is capable of so much more, and also how amazingly innovative the blogging community is. We’ll have to fix some of the loop holes of course, and we’ve got great people working on keeping things moving forward, but keep the feedback coming and let us know what we’re doing right and what you need from us…
People like Matt Cutts have been using similar approaches for years, we all know where it got those guys too.
MBL’s crime it appears is that they didn’t code things perfectly and that enabled people to do things like, surf as other people using a cookie exploit, or add co-authors without consent or add other sites to peoples accounts, again without their consent.
Ok, so yes, not the best things in the world to have had happen, it undermines faith and trust in whatever else could be ‘leaking out’ but come on lets face it, its not exactly the end of the world, or a reason to be filed under heinous crimesville but it’ll gain one a little attention if you come out and support a position one way or the other.
My personal take is one of so what who really really cares, who died even? I’ll still use mybloglog I think its a bit of harmless fun and a good way of getting new eyeballs on to what you do and say. Its a cracking little site that created a lot of interest and buzz in a segement that is continually evolving and growing. So it has a few holes that tech head nerds will point at and say OMG, how bad is that..yeah – so – and.
Some might wonder why MBL is such a focus, why are these evil seo types so interested? Well, SEO’s types tend to be the ones who push and poke and prod, its the nature of getting up where you need to be that drives it. SE algos are that little harder to get at these days,the requirement to gain traction and influence within their algo parameters dictates that people will look at the most cost and time efficient ways of increasing their scores. Like it or not, MBL offers a means of gaining attention. Attention = links, links = better scores, better scores = more money blah blah blah. Digg, reddit, delicious, wikipedia, dmoz all had or still have even, similar issues. Its the downsided price of success on the net.
Thankfully for MBL at least, most users are just happy to stick the thing on the their blog and leave it at that. They love the stat functionality, love the little people icons, love the little community and ‘blog love’ thing in general. I think its cool too, which is why I’ll continue to use it until something better comes along.
Overall, a storm in a teacup methinks. Could have been handled better, on all sides.
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