The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

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!

Takin’ MyBlogLog to School (in a good way)

Cord Silverstein has written an excellent primer on getting the most out of MyBlogLog, entitled MyBlogLog 101.  As a marketing hipster, he knows how to cultivate an image to which people respond well SO LISTEN UP!  In a nutshell, it's what we all know but never want to admit -- developing contacts is hard work.  You can't just blast out noise and expect people to respond favorably, no matter how friendly you sound.  Relationships are built on personal connection, on the fine-grained details, the shared experiences that unveil themselves over time.  "Love your site, please check out mine" ain't going to cut it.

So check out Cord's post for a 10-point guide to winning friends and influencing people all MyBlogLog stylee.  For extra credit, take the time to find one person who's blog sounds really interesting, read a dozen posts and *only then* email them what you think.  Report back on Monday what you learned.

MyBlogLog 101 -- part one
MyBlogLog 101 -- part two (technically, isn't this MyBlogLog 102?)

Takin’ MyBlogLog to School (in a good way)

Cord Silverstein has written an excellent primer on getting the most out of MyBlogLog, entitled MyBlogLog 101.  As a marketing hipster, he knows how to cultivate an image to which people respond well SO LISTEN UP!  In a nutshell, it's what we all know but never want to admit -- developing contacts is hard work.  You can't just blast out noise and expect people to respond favorably, no matter how friendly you sound.  Relationships are built on personal connection, on the fine-grained details, the shared experiences that unveil themselves over time.  "Love your site, please check out mine" ain't going to cut it.

So check out Cord's post for a 10-point guide to winning friends and influencing people all MyBlogLog stylee.  For extra credit, take the time to find one person who's blog sounds really interesting, read a dozen posts and *only then* email them what you think.  Report back on Monday what you learned.

MyBlogLog 101 -- part one
MyBlogLog 101 -- part two (technically, isn't this MyBlogLog 102?)

MyBlogLog welcomes our new presidential overlords

We're on our first Yahoo property!  You can now see your bad selves on each of the presidential candidate pages on Yahoo! Elections.  Get on over and join some candidate communities.  Maybe you dig Giuliani's political stances.  Maybe you'd like Hillary to be the first female President.  Maybe you love Obama because his voice sounds exactly like The Rock
(seriously -- I'd pay money to hear him ask if we "can smell what
Barack is cooking").   It's not our place to judge.  You have your own reasons  for liking one or more of the candidates and it's your right as an American (or someone on the same planet as America) to join their communities.

And remember, you can always *leave* a community.  Imagine Senator McCain waking up one day and seeing that half his community has defected.  The political power you now wield is tremendous! So go use it!

Joe Biden
Sam Brownback
Hillary Clinton
Chris Dodd
John Edwards
Rudolph Giuliani
Mike Huckabee
Duncan Hunter
Dennis Kucinich
John McCain
Barack Obama
Bill Richardson
Mitt Romney

Loads of new MyBlogLog features

MyBlogLog creates loads of data and we've had pretty much zero opportunity to provide useful ways of using it.  Thankfully, SoloSEO has stepped in and created a suite of tools for analyzing your network and comparing it with other members.  There are six tools to check out, and my favorites are "Compare Your Contacts" which identifies common members between two communities as well as unique members for each, and "Add Missing Contacts" which lists members of your communities that you haven't added as a contact yet.

We've been talking about this for days at MyBlogLog.  This is really wonderful and we're excited that members are working hard to decode our system and build tools on top of it.  We're thinking hard about how to best roll out a robust API (see Flickr for how to do this right) but in all honestly, it's going to take a while.  If you think you can make MyBlogLog better right now, go for it!

Thanks again, SoloSEO.

Paris Meetup

Merci bien! to the twenty or so people who came through last night's meet up at Sir Winston in Paris. If you have pictures, please leave a comment with a link to them.

We're happy to meet MyBlogLoggers. If you can put a couple dozen people in a room who love the site (or hate it in a useful way ), please let me know and I'll do my best to make it to wherever you are.

Holy crap, we have awesome members!

I've said it before but it's worth repeating.  Any success MyBlogLog has is due to the insane passion of our members.  One of the best parts of growing larger is that we are running into more cool people all the time.  But qureyoon deserves special recognition.  He has written up an awesome post modestly called The COMPLETE Guide to MyBlogLog(ging) and it's a winner. 

I was just IMing with Drew that the best thing about all the customer support mail I get is that it helps us figure out how to improve the site -- members keep asking me to add a co-author for them?  I ask the tech guys to make a self-service form and the requests drop to nil because the readers now have access to a great new featue.

So what does this have to do with qureyoon's post?  One of the common messages I get can be summarized as "I just joined MyBlogLog -- now what?"  Thanks to qureyoon, now we have a kick-ass summary for readers to check out.  Thanks, man!

Cleverhack.com knows what time it is

Joy @ Cleverhack posted a great article on getting the most out of MyBlogLog, including:

• Click through to the MyBlogLog front page often, that way you show up in the Recent Readers widget. I do see traffic coming in that way.
• Check out other people’s profiles and their blogs. They will usually reciprocate.
• There is some traffic value in belonging to the hot communities,
  although I’d expect the advantage to diminish as more people belong to
  those same communities.

She lists several other ways to make the most of our service, along with a great list of future features -- read my responses in her comments and then join in the discussion.

Growing Your MyBlogLog Community

It's simple if you have dedicated readers to begin with. Just post the sort of thing that Jay did:

Earlier this week, I pestered my readers (that would be YOU) to join my MyBlogLog community. A few hours later, Edgy Mama replied, “Okay, I’m here…now what?”

I wondered the same thing myself. It took me a day or two to realize
that it wasn’t about “doing” anything beyond what you normally do:
surf, read, and comment. MyBlogLog merely enhances this experience by putting a face on your community.

...

So, come on. Aren’t you just dying to sign up now? 19 people have already drank the Kool-Aid. Don’t be the last person left alive when the soldiers storm the compound!

Read the rest; he just keeps going.

TechCrunch Steps Up

Michael and Marshall sure are supportive this week [Thanks, guys!]. We're going to do our best to make sure it pays for them. Not only did we get Crunch'd Thursday evening, but now they've posted our Recent Readers widget on all their pages.

The widget leads to individual reader profiles and to the TechCrunch reader community, which is growing nicely. The community has doubled to 312 since Thursday evening. Fred says that it will become more populous than his blog's community of 491 in another 24 hours. I think it'll take 72 hours, but that's just me.

Please take a look, join up, and let us know what you think.