At Your Service
We've re-arranged the Edit Profile area to make it easier to keep track of the various services that are attached to your profile. Instead of mixing in everything into one long screen that had everything in there along with your personal details, we created a new tab called Services and pushed things there. We've also removed the concept of sharing your Services with just your contacts. We'll be adding more and more Services here and we don't want this to turn into a switchboard of user permissions. You're either publishing to the web or you're not. Let's keep it simple.
This new design clears the plate for a number of new features we have in the queue. I don't want to steal Eric's thunder here but let's just say that while MyBlogLog to date has been about providing pointers to different places where you publish, we want to fill that out a bit and bring together those bits and pieces of your virtual self under one roof and bring it to life.
Managing the URLs to your numerous hangouts is an important first step. Have a look see and review the Services tab for accuracy just to make sure we've got our ducks in a row. The more stuff you add here, the richer your profile will be. If you no longer wish to share your updates on any of these services here with the MyBlogLog community, simply remove it.
Finally, we hear you on your suggestion to allow an opt-out of the Community Messaging e-mails. If you look down to the bottom of the main Profile page, you'll see an option to recuse yourself.
Customer Service Email Issue
It appears that a rogue spam filter is preventing all customer service emails from getting to us today. We are working to get this fixed, but today emails to our domain are probably going to bounce back to you.
Until the error is remedied, if you have a question, you can view our Help page, our Customer Service page, or for immediate help, join the Users Helping Users group (include your MyBlogLog ID for approval to the list).
Hot Member – Director Tom
DirectorTom, aka Thomas Clifford, is a film producer with an eye toward corporate branding. The topics that his films normally encompass are HR, Diversity, Recruiting, New-hire orientation and Culture. He encourages corporations to share their films and to share their film tips as well.
Most people that know Tom (and there are tons of us), know him as a great guy and one of those people that you can go to for a favor, for honest feedback and for blogging know-how. Take a look at Tom's profile and check out his communities: Bringing Brands to Life with Remarkable Corporate Videos and Director Tom on Zaadz.
Do you deserve the spotlight? Let us know by sending an email to robyn@mybloglog.com. Do you know someone who deserves a mention? Don't be afraid to tag them Hot Member so we discover this great member as well.
MyBlogLog Crawlers & Bots
We have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of bots crawling MyBlogLog.com, collecting data on our members and trying to position avatars at the top of Reader Rolls over the last several weeks.
In a few cases, the number of requests from these bots have had the equivalent of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack -- not only on MyBlogLog.com but also our member sites. This cannot continue. If you are crawling this site, please stop.
To address this problem in the short term, we are implementing new server monitoring and will ban anyone hitting the server more than 1000 pages an hour. We will also be updating our Terms of Service to make scraping/gaming of site content against the rules. Beyond that it's for the lawyers to resolve; and nobody wants that.
That said, we have a bunch of new ways to get MyBlogLog data coming in the next several weeks. While we can't talk about them now, please stay tuned to this blog.
Thanks,
Todd
MyBlogLog Is Looking For A Bevy Of Engineering Talent
The engineers we have at MyBlogLog are ninjas, and we constantly tell them how amazed we are at what they pull off here daily. However, even ninjas must rest a few hours a day, so a few months ago we put out an all-call for more amazing engineers, to add to our growing team.
Since we still have open spots, we thought we'd make a full-scale plea for top-notch talent with this video, created by StandOutJobs.com. If you are interested in working in a really cool team and for a really cool company, please send your email to Eric@mybloglog.com.
Sign of the Times
Part of putting down roots at Yahoo is finding out how to get things done and who to talk to for what. I've been a huge fan of MyBlogLog and was psyched when they decided to join Yahoo. Once they got here, I hung out at their offices and took it upon myself to make sure they were getting settled. Long story short, we dug hanging out together and I'm happy to say that I'm now part of the team as the Product Manager.
Most of my work is behind the scenes. Coordinating with other teams at Yahoo, pointing out internal tools that the team can use, important stuff like casting the tie-breaker vote on where to go for lunch.
As a small team, we're not big on slick marketing campaigns and prefer to let the community speak for itself. If you visit MyBlogLog central, you'll see that we're not big on office decoration either. Our only decoration to speak of is a vase of flowers that I think were sent as a gift but is now a petrified reminder of someone's kindness. We share office space with a number of hip designers and information architects at the Yahoo Research Labs in Berkeley and they suspicious of our lack of decorative flair.
So when colleague Jeffery Bennett offered to print out our logo on a massive plotter, paste it to some fiber board and carefully trace our "cursed curved fonts" with an x-acto knife, we jumped at the offer. Secretly I think Jeff's motivation was so he could tag us in meatspace (he took the photo on this post too) but with the simple addition of this sign, hanging by two strands of twine from Eric's truck, we coalesced as a team and made our space our own.
So that's me in the picture above, in the back, pointing to our new sign and, figuratively, this is what I hope to contribute. Simple signs pointing to where people can find the things they need to help themselves to make MyBlogLog an extension of themselves. Looking forward to working with all of you on making the web a little more personal.
Member Spotlight: Robert Kiyosaki
Robert Kiyosaki is the author of the celebrated "Rich Dad Poor Dad", which is the longest-running best-seller on the New York
Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and BusinessWeek best-seller
lists, to date. This book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for almost 5 years.
He's a world-renowned expert on finance, and Yahoo! is lucky to have him as an expert on the Y! Finance Site (see Community page here). A 4th generation Japanese-American, Robert is a Vietnam vet (Marine Officer-Helicopter Gunship Pilot) who hails from Hawaii. After college and Vietnam, Robert went on to work at Xerox, found several companies and retire at age 47.
What makes Robert's advice so special, is not only that it's worked for him, but how he came about this advice in the first place. Robert had a Rich Dad and a Poor Dad (two dads), both of whom gave him advice about money. This unique perspective gives his story a richness that most financial planner's and strategists just don't have.
Take a look at Robert's page and friend him (he's lonely right now), and leave him a message. Your question just might show up on the Y! finance page. Alternatively, how about some free advice, ala his free podcast?
Think you deserve a spotlight? Know someone who is a Hot Member? Tag them (or yourself) Hot Member, or let me know via email at robyn@mybloglog.com.
MyBlogLog Service Issue
Ten minutes ago MyBlogLog experienced a spike in our primary user servers that created a replication issue to the slave databases. The spike has been fixed and the slaves are catching up. We expect the service to be back to 100% in the next 5 minutes.
Todd
UPDATE: Final slave servers are nearly caught-up. We will be pulling the MyBlogLog.com website out of maintenance mode (which we turned on to relieve stress on the database boxes) in the next 10 minutes.
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