The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

Web 2.0 Expo – San Francisco

If you're thinking about going to the Web 2.0 Expo in a few weeks, here's another reason to attend. Use the invite code websf08bl3 and get $100 off.

Todd and I will there along with some of the developers if we can get them out of the office. I'm on the phone now with the Yahoo folks and looks like there some good parties being planned (keep your Wednesday evening open).

Look forward to seeing you there.

Graphing Social Patterns

Todd and I attended the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Diego this past week and had the opportunity to meet MyBlogLog members and developers as well as announce the public availability of the MyBlogLog API.

The conference series is the brainchild of Dave McClure, a self-professed Facebook "fan boy" and while the first conference six months ago was primarily about the Facebook ecosystem, this one examined about a world in which features and behaviors typical of Facebook break out onto the open web to be used across multiple social networks.

What happens when you aggregate updates into centralized "activity streams" such as in MyBlogLog's New with Me feature? What are the challenges in aggregating this content? What is possible once you have this information in one place? It all comes back to some of the things I wrote about back in July, MyBlogLog: DNS for People

The team also whipped together a hack that uses the MyBlogLog API to experiment with using Bluetooth proximity to locate your social network in physical space. We'll be running this hack at next week's SxSW interactive conference as well so if you're going there, head on over to m.mybloglog.com and register your bluetooth device (laptop or phone) and see if you can find your MyBlogLog friends!

US Elections Update

If the MyBlogLog community is any kind of proxy for the general public, here's how it's going to go down tonight. Compared to our last post, both Obama and McCain have picked up the most momentum which is pretty much what we're hearing in the press.

Democrats

1. Barack Obama    75 members
2. Hillary Clinton    31 members

Republicans

1. John McCain    11 members
2. Mitt Romney    9 members
3. Ron Paul    2 members
4. Mike Huckabee    1 member

For another perspective, be sure to check out how the Yahoo Developer Network blog graded each candidate's page based on site performance and optimization.

We have a winner!

It brings me great pleasure to reveal one of the worst kept secrets on the internet. The winner of last month's MyBlogLog Problogger contest is. . .  Survival of the Feedest. With 477 new members added since the contest was announced on November 8th, Feedest surged in the final week to push past the Buen Amigo who started out strong with an early lead.

The total haul includes:

• One Year Pro MyBlogLog Subscription
• $500 Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit
• A 1-year membership to SEOmoz Premium Membership
• 1 Complete Blog Redesign
• One Year Subscription To Yaro Starak's Blog Mastermind
• A Featured Community for the month of December at MyBlogLog
• An invitation to the invite-only blog gathering, SOBCon 2008, in Chicago

Leo, congratulations and look out for an email from me.

It was awesome browsing through the leaderboard to see all the great sites out there. We'll be sure to do this again sometime (and figure out how to make it open to non-US folks too!) and just to share the love a little, here's the final tally of the top ten entries and their final member counts.

Site  (community members added between 11/8 - 11/30)

1. Survival of the Feedest (477)
2. SEOlogs (424)
3. GorillaSushi (225)
4. Buen Amigo (213)
5. Collective Thoughts (177)
6. Crayon Writer (169)
7. A Blog about Nothing (156)
8. Linkbait Me (143)
9. Joe Tech (131)
10. TSP Blog (130)

Congratulations everyone!

Stay Tuned for a Special Announcement

Time's up! Pencils down!

The contest is over. I hope you've had as much fun as we had browsing the leaderboard during the past month. So many interesting blogs to read out there, really great stuff. We also learned some things about running a contest and will put those lessons to good use next time around.

While we're tallying up the totals, I'll be packing my bags for Las Vegas for the annual gathering of webmasters (remember them?) at PubCon 2007. If you're in the area, do come on by and visit the Yahoo! booth where, at noon on December 5th I'll be announcing the winner.

Memcached Hackathon in Sunnyvale

We nicknamed Chris Goffinet, one of our engineers, Optimus for a reason. Chris lives and breathes optimization and has managed to squeeze an amazing amount of performance from our machines. On a fairly regular basis he'll come in after the weekend and throw out an off-handed comment like, "Oh yeah, i just wrote a little routine that'll give us twice the capacity that we had before,"

Chris' latest interest is in memcached and to share his passion and bring other like-minded engineers together he's hosting an all-night pow-wow with other memcached groupies over at the Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale.

If you're around on December 14-15 13-14 for an all-night, pizza-fueled hackathon, swing on by.

If you've never heard of memcached, or things like "pluggable storage backends," stay home, watch a movie, while the engineers take over the world.