My Blog Log - Why Am I Doing This? Options

[SEOigloo]

Greetings All,
This month, I signed up for MyBlogLog, realizing this was the service via which avatars were being displayed on many of the sites I visit. So, I managed to get an account and upload my igloo. So far so good.

But...I'm not really sure what else I am supposed to do with it.

Happily, I discovered that most of YOU ALL appear to have mybloglog accounts and I've been adding all the Cre8 folks I can find to my contact list. My sincere thanks to all of you who have added me. I even sent a message to Bill to see if I understood the message thing correctly and he kindly replied.

But...is that all there is to this? What are you using it for? I saw that Matt McGee, the nice fellow from Small Business SEM, appears to be talking about sports via his messages on this. What am I supposed to do with it? Why is it good to have 'contacts'? I feel I'm missing something...or maybe really all it is for is the avatar thing.

I would so appreciate hearing from folks about this. Cre8asite appears to have a very healthy membership going on over at MyBlogLog.

Thank you!
Miriam

[EGOL]

I have it on a few pages and use it to keep track of traffic going out to other websites. This helps inform content development for my own site.

[SEOigloo]

Hello Egol,
Thank you for your comment. It made me realize, however, that I should clarify that I am not using MYBLOGLOG on our blog. I signed up for it in order to be able to have my avatar appear on the blogs where it is being used. I don't intend to put it on my own blog, which I feel is crowded enough as it is.
Thanks for mentioning what you use it for.
Miriam

[Ruud]

Hm, than I wouldn't know...

The fun from MyBlogLog was that you could see which outgoing links people follow. Like Egol says, that gives you nice information. For example, if in an article about widgets many people follow the external link to read about the history of widgets, maybe that would be good to add to your own site instead.

Before implementing MyBlogLog on your site you might want to consider the following:

• MyBlogLog Tracks Your Visitors Ad Clicks: Yahoo tries to figure out for itself what Adsense is doing
• MyBlogLog Exploit - Getting Free Keyword Targeted Links
• Another Mybloglog Exploit - This One A Little More Harmful
• MyBlogLog Trick - How To Surf The Web As ShoeMoney

[joedolson]

I can't see much reason to join MyBlogLog if you're not going to install it on your blog. It gives you the ability to let people know that you read their blogs and consider yourself a member of their community without necessitating commenting. But that's about as far as it goes, I think.

As a note, however, you don't have to install any of the visible components of MyBlogLog in order to take advantage of the additional statistics --- you just need to install the base tracking code. That's what I've done. I don't care much for widgets...but I like statistics!

[JohnMu]

I know it's not all that mature, but I really like looking at people's blogs and noticing that people I "know" have recently been here as well. It makes the blog appear more like a meeting place - "hey, I almost met you on so-and-so's blog" . It's just a bit fun. I know it's not secure and anyone can sign up as anyone else, but I feel that the people I know and trust are not likely to be fake . Yes, I know, I'm falling for it...

I do notice people trying to market to the users every now and then - leaving messages for me, etc... but I'm good at ignoring that.

Perhaps you should turn the question around: why did you sign up?

John

[bwelford]

Well I did it for the widgets that I can put on my blogs. As was said, it makes the place look a bit 'lived in' if there are a few friendly faces around. If you use the smaller icons, you can put quite a number within a very small area of your screen real estate.

[cre8pc]

I signed up last year when I saw SEOMoz had been experimenting with it by having "2nd most viewed" etc. images appear on links.

I hated the appearance of annoying pictures, (which you can turn off. Do they even offer it anymore?) but looked into it anyway.

The free inbound link tracking was too good to pass up, although now there are other ways to see where folks are coming from and who is linking.

Now I leave it there because I'm sucked in.

[tamar]

Beyond analytics, I like it simply because it's a community. I've touched base with a few people (including MyBlogLog top dawgs) through the MyBlogLog messaging system. While it's not something really engaging (I wouldn't spent more than just a few minutes at a time on the site itself), there's that fun element to it. And it has some nice (dare I say revealing?) statistics too.

It's nice to know about community involvement and what interests people at least. Putting a face on visitors is also rewarding. From these avatars, hopefully I'll recognize people I meet at SES. ("Hey, I know you from your avatar!")

[SEOigloo]

Thank you for all the replies, everybody.
Kim, that emoticon cracks me up!

Ruud, I appreciate those links. Good to see both sides of the coin on this.
At this point, I, too, think it's interesting when I go to a new blog and I can get some idea of the readership from this. I don't know if I'll use the tracking. I'll have to think about it more.

It was good of you all to tell me your uses for this!
Miriam

[kulpreet_singh]

I just see mybloglog as an extra tool, one of the many thousands, which just happens to be more popular. It could be (have been) more useful if it extended both the social media and analytics aspects to provide greater value to the user. However it currently underachieves in comparison to most websites or applications in either of those aspects. I have it, because there was a buzz around it, but I rarely find it useful.

This post has been edited by kulpreet_singh: Mar 22 2007, 08:03 PM