MyBlogLog is relevant once again
Oh. My. God. Do I love being relatively done with Yahoo! integration tasks and moving back to site improvements, or what! This evening we'll be rolling out our first revised sorts of communities and community members.
Up until now, members' communities were sorted alphabetically, which didn't provide any real information or additional context. Worse, it encourage people to rename their blog in order to game their position in line (!!!!!!!! Blogmemes, I'm looking at you, buddy).
Similarly, community members have been displayed based solely on when they joined the community. Again, there's nothing useful to be gleaned here beyond the list of community members. And again, it's prone to gaming -- the first person to join a community always shows up first, so it's in an SMO's best interest to join communities early and often.
When you look at profile of someone who is a member of 50 communities, it's super helpful if they are sorted based on some sort of meaning. Same thing when looking at a community with 200 members -- how do you choose which people to click on (and don't say "the ones with the bouncing breasts"). Later today we'll be sorting these in a new way that will hopefully bubble the most relevant people to the top of the list. Best of all, because relevance is dynamic, the order of these lists will change over time so that the most interesting people and communities will be presented to you.
This is just a first swipe, so expect many more changes in the future as we refine this, and don't hesitate to give us feedback (like you would ever hesitate) about how we can filter this info even better. In the future, expect to see several tabs on each section, so that you can sort the information in a variety of ways -- relevance for me is not necessarily relevance for you.
So for now, be aware that it's coming today and that the order of things will change from what you are used to seeing. Don't be alarmed, be frickin' excited. MyBlogLog is back and we came to play, baby!
(A special call-out to ilkeryoldas, who clued us into the whole gaming communities and contacts.)
20 messages a day — what do we lose?
I wrote a really long post today about where I'm coming from on this limit thing, but the team said "too long -- no one's going to read it." I'll probably post it when no one is looking and everyone can ignore it 
Instead, I thought I'd just post some examples of what messages have come up against the 20 unreciprocated message limit (without naming names, of course):
- Warm greetings and salutations!
- Hi! I'm holding a Technorati Favorites exchange on ----- and I was wondering if you might like to participate. Here's more info: http://www.-----.com/blog-website-promotion/-----/ Thanks!
- Hey! Hope you´re doing great! I just published a EBook called "-----" on my blog [ http://-----.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/----- ]. Would love to hear your feedback about it. Rock on!
- hi,have a nice day...see you at http://www.-----.it/----- Bye
- Hey how are you doing
- Hi , nice blog u have there !! Do visit mine at www.-----.net .Feel free to join my community
- hi Join new frinds @ www.-----.com @
- Do drop by mine at http://www.-----.sg/ for a laugh sometimes! If you like what you laugh at, care to join my community as well?
- Hi, we'd love to welcome you to Mybloglog community, hope u have fun. God bless you!
- Hey there wuz goin on?????? / Hey wuz goin on? ur a newbie rite? / Hey party guy wana chat?
And my personal favorite, just:
If I got this in my email box, you'd call it spam, so why is it not spam in my MyBlogLog message folder?
Interesting MyBlogLog Usage
While trolling through my RSS feeds I saw that The Pisstakers are hosting a weekly MyBlogLog contest.
Win Gummi Bears and a blog review!
The Pisstakers run a weekly event called MyBlogLog Sunday.
Every Sunday whenever Ed the editor starts blogging, he takes a
snapshot of the last 10 visitors on the MyBlogLog widget in the
sidebar. He visits each of those ten blogs and does a fun mini-review.
Those ten blogs are then eligible to win the weekly prize of the gummi
bears and the full blog review. You accomplish that by being the blog
to send him the most traffic during the week. *Note: you must be a MyBlogLog member to have your avatar show up in the widget. (via Polliwog)
For a major amount of Gummi Bears and a site review (link-love baby, yeah!), check out their Sunday MyBlogLog day. I hope you get a toothache!
Spam-a-lama-dama
Have you ever gotten this message:
Hey, love your site, check out mine at http://spammer.com/spamalot
Sure, we all have... And most of us are quick to report the obvious spam (and rightly so).
The challenge is that while many of us are quite annoyed about these sort of messages, some users like the give and take of these exchanges. We've seen communities grow and actually flourish by these seemingly impersonal 'spam-like' intros. In fact some of these have grown into communities that bounce personal communiques back and forth hourly.
So we begin to see sites that you and I may be uninterested in checking out are getting widespread membership and full-fledged communities are borne.
So, what to do?
There are a few methods we are investigating, even as I write, that could help us weed out members who consistently game the system.
One such method we will be employing today. The way that it works is to put a cap on the number of messages a user can send per day. The caveat here is that if that user receives a message back, which of course denotes conversation, the person's daily limit will increase. For us, this seems a worthy method to try.
The limit will be 20 initially, and if we see that it is just not enough then we'll increase it. Again, your feedback on this is vital for us to know if the message cap method is successful. Please do not hesitate to tell us if we are off our rocker. Don't hold back (I know you won't) because we need the help of our users more than you realize.
MyBlogLog is first and foremost a community. We exist to serve you and we need to know how we are doing there. I look forward to hearing how we are doing. Just be gentle, remember, I'm new here.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
It was only a year and change ago that Scott Rafer emailed me out of the blue and said "this stats thing you have is pretty cool, and I think we can do something really amazing with it -- you interested?" And now here we are, sitting in Yahoo! offices with plans for conquering the world. He knew what he was talking about.
When we were acquired, Scott was asked to stay on board and guide us through the transition. Now that we're on Yahoo! hardware and deep into integration with Y! and external services, he has completed his mission and is moving on. I speak for the entire team when I say that it has been an honor and a privilege to work with Scott for the last fifteen months. Enjoy your honeymoon, bro -- I wish you nothing but happiness and can't wait to hook up when you get back.
Everyone who is MyBlogLog’s new Community Manager, raise your hand.
Several months ago we put out a call to our members looking for someone
to join the team as our community manager. Today I am proud to
announce that Robyn Tippins of Sleepy Blogger has taken the job, moved her family across the country and is sitting
next to me (and already kicking a little ass). I'll leave it to Robyn to
fill you in on her deets, so I want to take moment to let you
know what she'll be doing and how the site will be better for it.
As community manager, Robyn will be splitting her time between customer
service and community outreach. Initially she'll be spending more of
her time on the customer service, but as she gets systems set up,
she'll be spending more time on the outreach part of the role, and as a
result you'll be seeing a lot of her.
It's no secret that MyBlogLog has some spotty customer service. If you
catch me at the right time you can get a 12-second response time to
your questions. But other times, it can take a month or more to hear
back. We've tried to mitigate this by creating a customer service
autoresponse and FAQ, but neither are great. Robyn will be taking over
the customer service requests while overseeing the launch of several
services:
- A comprehensive FAQ -- she'll be beefing up the FAQ to better
answer all of the questions that we get on a regular basis. - Integration guides -- a service-by-service guide to adding
MyBlogLog's widgets to your site or blog - Community bulletin boards -- the best place to get help is from
other people who have had success with MyBlogLog. There will be
sections for tech support, traffic building, promoting your sites and
more. - Yahoo! Customer Care integration -- eventually, we're going to
need more than one person working on customer service and Robyn will
act as the bridge between MyBlogLog and our parent company in this
regard. - Additionally, Robyn will be spearheading changes to the site that cut down on confusion. For instance, we still get a dozen people
a day marking themselves as porn when they're not, and Robyn will
figure out how to better communicate how MyBlogLog works.
In her community outreach capacity, Robyn will be a constant presence on all things MyBlogLog. She'll be engaging in conversation on community pages at
MyBlogLog.com, posting on the MyBlogLog blog, responding to questions
in the blogosphere and attending and speaking at social media conferences.
Additionally, Robyn and I will continue to chat with you to better
understand what you want from MyBlogLog and how we can make it happen.
For instance, Robyn will be another brain in the Big Spam Debate.
So that's a lot to digest in one sitting. And if you think it's tough
to read through it all, imagine what it's like to suddenly be
responsible for it! So while Robyn is already kicking serious butt on
the customer service tip, don't expect to see a bulletin board on
Monday. Your patience is greatly appreciated as we
integrate Robyn into the small place that is MyBlogLog and the big
place that is Yahoo!.
If you have questions, please leave a comment in the companion post by
Robyn (right next to this one).
Cheers!
Eric
Jet Lagged But Loving MyBlogLog
As some of you have heard, I've
just joined the staff of MyBlogLog as the Community Manager.
I couldn't be more excited to work:
1. In this position
Community is really my passion. For the last 9 years I've had fun doing
all sorts of things, from gaming to media, and while that's been fun,
community is what has always kept me going.
2. At this company
MyBlogLog has one of the coolest products I've seen in this iteration of
Web 2.0. I've been a loyal user since summer of last year and have just
really enjoyed the widget, the community and the stats, but I never
really considered working here until I saw the all-call for the
position. Gosh I'm glad I read my feeds that day, huh?
3. With these great people
The people here are all so smart and fun (not to mention rock
aficionados), that thus far coming to work has been something I've
looked forward to doing. I mean, we spent lunch yesterday at one of the
Yahoo Cafes watching videos of 80s cheese music and trying to one-up
each other with useless pop trivia.
That said, I have a full plate here. I'll be the one answering your
customer service emails, thinking through and developing a comprehensive
FAQ, collaborating on the spam question, and more. Plus, I'll get to be
lurking around the blogosphere and at conferences, as usual. But, I
still can't help but think, 'and I get paid for this?'
Thanks again for all your congratulations. My inbox was bursting with
them this morning and it feels fabulous to be so well regarded by such
great people. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Jet Lagged But Loving MyBlogLog
As some of you have heard, I've
just joined the staff of MyBlogLog as the Community Manager.
I couldn't be more excited to work:
1. In this position
Community is really my passion. For the last 9 years I've had fun doing
all sorts of things, from gaming to media, and while that's been fun,
community is what has always kept me going.
2. At this company
MyBlogLog has one of the coolest products I've seen in this iteration of
Web 2.0. I've been a loyal user since summer of last year and have just
really enjoyed the widget, the community and the stats, but I never
really considered working here until I saw the all-call for the
position. Gosh I'm glad I read my feeds that day, huh?
3. With these great people
The people here are all so smart and fun (not to mention rock
aficionados), that thus far coming to work has been something I've
looked forward to doing. I mean, we spent lunch yesterday at one of the
Yahoo Cafes watching videos of 80s cheese music and trying to one-up
each other with useless pop trivia.
That said, I have a full plate here. I'll be the one answering your
customer service emails, thinking through and developing a comprehensive
FAQ, collaborating on the spam question, and more. Plus, I'll get to be
lurking around the blogosphere and at conferences, as usual. But, I
still can't help but think, 'and I get paid for this?'
Thanks again for all your congratulations. My inbox was bursting with
them this morning and it feels fabulous to be so well regarded by such
great people. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Do you like things that are cool?
A few pieces of coolness at Casa de MyBlogLog:
- We are now on shiny new Yahoo! servers, which means slowdowns should be a thing of the past. From the moment we switched over the the site ran noticeably faster and I've seen more than one random comment on the web remarking that the widgets are much faster. Many thanks to Todd, John and Steve (and all the Yahoo! folks who supported us) for the long nights required to make the switchover work so well. As Todd called out earlier, there's more stuff a poppin' over the next couple of weeks, so give us a shout if something isn't quite right.
- We have started policing community names because the leading punctuation was making the Top 50 tag cloud look like ass. Thanks to everyone who emailed us about this.
- Zane has a cool new site called MyBlogLoggers.com that aims to make it even easier for MyBlogLog members to chat with one another. Yes, we *really* need to set up a community bulletin board. It's coming soon, I swear.
- The MyBlogLog reader rolls are back up for good on the Yahoo! Election Pages. The CSS conflict was resolved and, oh happy day, the widgets are back.
- Our fabulous new community manager is currently at her second day of Yahoo!'s orientation. More news later this week!
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