Hey y'all! I’m Tilly, your new resident community manger here at MyBlogLog HQ. Let’s get this party started and break the ice. To show how much MyBlogLog loves you, we offer all sorts of ways we can get to know each other:

* We start at the basics, a simple FAQ page. Full of, well, frequently asked questions! Inside you will find all sorts of how-to's and tips for making your way through the MBL world. It sure could use some love though! Keep your eye on this page, as we have plans to spice up this page in the coming weeks.

* The gang here has got some mad love for Twitter. Just follow @mybloglog and get all the news and releases, hot off the press from here in HQ. Or, in times of crisis, give a SOS out to @mblsupport and someone will come to your rescue. If you wonder what we're up to, check out our Crowdstatus page.

* Find yourself in a tricky spot while optimizing your MyBlogLog experience, and are looking for more personal, one on one help? We are never more then a click away to guide you in the right direction and get you hooked up! Just drop us a line at our contact form and someone on the crew will personally get in touch with you.

* Ever had one of those moments, commuting home from the office, or standing in line at the grocery store, where all of a sudden, OMG, you have a great idea for mybloglog? We have just the place for you. Check out our suggestion board where you can add new suggestions or vote on others. We never stop looking for ways to make MyBlogLog more fun to use and are always up for a challenge.

* Are you a hardcore, serious MyBlogLog uber-member? Our Yahoo Group is your place to shine! Stop by and point to cool sites, share a clever trick you picked up while playing with our widgets, or just come by and drop us a love note. Think of it like our own little online living room, where no one will ever tell you to take your feet off the coffee table or make you use a coaster.

* And, oh dear, I save the best for last. Check out the one of the coolest new things we just got involved with here at MBL HQ, Get Satisfaction. Its a site where customers, companies, employees, heck, anyone can get together, share ideas or help each other out! We liked the concept so much that we’ve used their shiny new API to bring their service into our site.

We want you guys to know how much influence you have when it comes to what we do here at MyBlogLog. Everyday our service is evolving into more than just widgets and stats . It's community, it's lifestreaming; it's as technical or as basic as you want it to be. Let us help you find out how to make the best of what we offer. This is our pact, this is our inspiration.

So, what are you waiting for? Drop me a line and let’s get better acquainted.

If you have stories about how you've used the MyBlogLog API in interesting ways, we'd love to hear about them!

With Iowa, Wyoming, and New Hampshire behind us, the US Presidential Elections are now running full steam ahead. Yahoo News is a great resource for all the latest news on the campaigns and candidates and of course MyBlogLog is right in there with a Community for each candidate. We're not claiming to be Gallup or anyone but if we use community member counts for each candidate, here's how each candidate matches up:

Democrats

1. Barack Obama    71 members
2. Hillary Clinton    31 members
3. John Edwards    14 members
4. Bill Richardson    5 members (AP says he just dropped out)
5. Dennis Kucinich    3 members
6. Mike Gravel    0 members

Republicans

1. Rudy Giuliani    10 members
2. John McCain    8 members
3. Mitt Romney    8 members
4. Duncan Hunter   3 members
5. Mike Huckabee    1 member
6. Ron Paul    1 member
7. Fred Thompson    0 members

Add yourself to the candidate of your choice - we'll check back from time to time and update the standings.

So when they contacted me to see if I'd be interested in speaking about how MyBlogLog could help non-profit sites build community, I naturally jumped at the chance. The interview was published today and we'll follow it up with my speaking at an upcoming Net Tuesday event in San Francisco on February 12th. If you're around, drop by.

PS. One question that stumped me was a good example of a non-profit using MyBlogLog in a creative way. If you're a non-profit that's using MyBlogLog this is a throw down to you. Share your story!

PPS. We recently added kiva.org to the Services tab so you can point people to your kiva.org lender profile and, in this time of giving, inspire others.

::Robyn climbs up on her soapbox::  So, without further ado, I give you THE MYBLOGLOG PROBLOGGER CONTEST!

The rules are pretty simple.  The community that grows the most, in their gross total, from now to November 30, 2007, will win.  You can see the full list of legalese here.  The winner will be announced live from the floor of PubCon in Las Vegas by me and Ian.  We'll also sprinkle them liberally all over the site. 

::Robyn begins Oscar acceptance speech::  I'd like to thank the sponsors, who without their freebies (yes, they all donated these), we could not offer you such cool prizes.  Our sponsors:

SEOMoz
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Designs By RS
Yaro Starak
SOBCon 2008

Now, get over to the contest and register your blog.  You can keep up to date with who is in the lead here at the leaderboard, and you can see your own place, if you are not in the top 100, within the Edit Profile section of your Profile on MyBlogLog.  Good luck!  We're rooting for you.

They don't have a tangible value, but are a measure of the social goodwill you built.

Believe it or not, relationships can build to a deep level, even if the person lives 12 time zones away or is someone you haven't met (aside from seeing their avatar), 5 year relationship notwithstanding.

A friend told me about the concept of a "goodwill bank".
In any relationship, the things you do have the effect of depositing "social dollars" into the goodwill bank, or withdrawing from it.

Helping out a friend in need = depositing social dollars into your balance.

Asking a friend for a favor = withdrawing social dollars from the same balance.

Your social dollar balance has a way of accumulating "interest" too. As you continue to help people, they'll naturally talk to their friends about it, give you a recommendation in a social network, blog about your efforts, create buzz about you in the forum.

The best form of social goodwill is accumulated paradoxically through altruistic means...meaning if you set out solely to help someone out, without any expectation of reward, you'd probably get the biggest return from that.

Call it the "pay it forward" effect if you will.

If you help three people, who go on to help another three people each, inevitably, you'll perpetuate the cycle of goodwill and the returns come back to you multiplied a hundredfold.

The bottom line: Help others WITHOUT any expectation of a return and you'll get rewarded sometime and it'll come back to you multiplied many times over in the most pleasant manner possible.

It might be that newbie blogger or internet marketer whom you extend a helping hand to and subsequently becomes a superstar and helps you out in turn.

The universe works in mysterious ways.

To allay some readers doubts that "no post by Andrew Wee would be complete without the mention of schmoe", here's the schmoe take on things.

A schmoe on the other hand will help someone or do something SOLELY for the purpose of profiting from it. In 99% of cases, the effort will be transparent to the point of laughability...and part of the torrent of spam comments or emails I get each morning.

If you're constantly withdrawing social dollars from the goodwill bank, expect to be hit in an unexpected fashion...the likelihood is that it might be unpleasant though.

As Spock says "Live long and prosper"...and the pointy-eared dudes are usually right...

Be well.

Andrew Wee is a MyBlogLog Advisor and blogs about blogging, affiliate marketing and social traffic generation at WhoIsAndrewWee.com. His MyBlogLog profile is: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/andreww/

Conversely, a member who has only selfish reasons for being in a community, will not be able to fully experience any community site.  I'm always saddened to read that someone came here only to send their link out to the allotted 20 people per day.  It seems to be such a waste of time, since traffic that results from spam is rarely useful to the site owner in terms of subscriptions, advertisements, sales, etc.

2.  A Desire To Make Friends
I scan through the conversations I see on MyBlogLog and it's heartening to see how many online friendships have developed through this community.  By being able to find people with similar interests, some of our members have decided to co-author blogs together. I've also seen friendly banter that has turned into real friendship.  Making friends with similar interests is integral to any community site.
 

3.  A Desire To Work Within The System
The policies that we set up here are always created with your needs in mind.  The 'community-join' limitations, the Rock Star message algorithm, the racy avatar deletions and the spam flags were all designed to help our users.  Each was created because of an outcry from the community.

A moderately skilled techie can build a bot or any other type of program to overcome these systems, but users who genuinely care about the other members, like they were real people (because they are), would never consider harming their fellow MyBlogLog friends. 

4.  A Wholistic, "What's Best For The Community" Outlook
The perfect example of this, is the response to the racy avatars I've been deleting lately (over a hundred in the last two weeks, by the way). 

1. Some people ignore the fact their avatars have been deleted and post another, just as bad as the first.   
2. Some people will ask why their avatar is wrong, since the human body is beautiful.  Agreed and agreed, but it's not really fair to ask business sites and family blogs to either show your avatar when you visit or spend all day monitoring their site for your images, just because you look really, really hot naked. 
   
3. Some people apologize and upload a new image that is more appropriate for a publicly viewable site.

In each of these examples, you see different ways that people responded to a particular problem, but only in the last one do you see an example of a user who is 'community-minded'.  They may not have realized that their image was a 'mature' image, but rather than complain, they chose to put the community first. 

One guy said, "That's cool. I can respect that."  He understood that we're not prudes here (far from it), but because MyBlogLog avatars show up on a variety of sites, perhaps an image of cleavage is not appropriate, even though it's far from porn.

5.  The Golden Rule
Before a user messages someone or uploads any images, I think a great question would be, "Is this something that I would want to see/read and is this something that the person I am sending this would want to see/read."

• Sure, you want to gain more viewers, but is sending out thank you messages to every person who views your profile the right way to do it?  If you were in their shoes, would you want a thank you from every site you visited online?  I think you might think that was a little creepy to have several dozen thank you emails in your inbox every time you checked your email.

• Sure, you want people to notice that picture of a hot girl on your avatar (whether or not it's you), but would you be impressed by that?  Would you click that avatar?  Agreed that you may see an attractive avatar and think it's hot, but what would be your first impression of the person who needed to resort to the 'hot chick' gimmick to make you notice them?

In my experience, bloggers who write well and actively take part in discussions tend to get noticed, and build large followings.  Bloggers that just leave "I agree" or "Welcome" comments everywhere just annoy people enough that they refuse to read their blog. If you want readers, you'll have to write content that is so darn useful that people can't live without it.

If you aren't writing content like that, then chances are that no matter how hard to message users, you still aren't going to get noticed.   Start by improving your content, and then I assure you that the 'where to find users' problem will cease to exist.

Do you have any additions to this list?  If so, send me an email to robyn@mybloglog.com and I'll pick a few to spotlight here on this blog.

Tags: Wallstrip, Howard Lindzon, CBS

This self-described 'punk kid' is a great writer and has already lent her considerable voice to the MySpace/Photobucket fiasco, Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations, the Blogger's Code of Conduct as well as several other great stories, and that's just this week!  I'm particulary partial to this one.

She's been quoted in The New York Times, Fast Company and Business Week, and she really knows her stuff.  If you are interested in business blogging, social networking, business travel or Web 2.0 (and I know you are).  Drop by Teresa's profile and check out her sites.

I hope you liked this Hot Member spotlight.  We're going to make it a regular feature here on the MyBlogLog blog.