The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

Congrats to Iain Dale, et al.

Sites about a particular topic appear on MyBlogLog in bursts. Since Iain Dale created a community for his Diary early in September, British liberals and conservatives have been following him onto the service in droves. Today 18 Doughty Street, "Britain’s first political Internet TV Channel," launched and Iain's a big part of it.

He and I have not corresponded, but Iain must like our service a bit as someone at 18doughtystreet created a community for the new site and installed one of our widgets at 10am US EDT this morning. In just the last five hours, 18 people have joined the new community.

We are beginning to have enough visitors in this interest group that we're driving a bit of traffic back to those blogs. Iain Lindley posted his referrer stats for September, and MyBlogLog did pretty darn well. He only signed up for MyBlogLog on September 18th, and we're #3 on his list for the month. In addition to Councillor Lindley, a least half-dozen other British councillors (plus these) and hundreds of concerned citizens and commentators are now on on MyBlogLog.

We owe everyone a good way to organize around the topics they care about. We're working out what to do. Suggestions are welcome.

Music Search or Just SEO your MP3s?

David Byrne wants just the right thing, but is not quite searching in the right place:

Soon enough a site will open that is like a Google search for music
downloads — downloads that are not copy-protected but you still pay
for. eMusic tracks have no copy protection, for example, but their
catalogue is limited. Eventually a meta search will turn up the tracks
you want, wherever they live, on whomever’s site.

Narendra, co-founder of Webshots and 30boxes, danced closer to the solution yesterday, but he did so in response to a completely different Battelle posting:

Google has not yet been able to
index the 420 million photos that live on Webshots and have a wealth of
metadata associated with them. They need to focus on improving their
crawling ability and be able to play with large existing systems like
Webshots and Flickr to improve relevance instead of forays into odd and
ambiguous user annotation.

The solution isn't a Music Google; it's building a new site that springboards off Google's massive traffic. Jason DeFilippo showed us all the way when he put together the Technorati Tags system. It's so much better to ride your users' tags and links to put your new search engine on to the first results page of the big one. It helps your users almost as much as it helps you. The linklove from T-tags been a big factor in Technorati's success, and they're trying to copy that success universally via microformats. However, sector knowledge and passion matter. Techorati's expertise in and enthusiasm for blogs is clear, but do they possess the same for events, identity, streaming media, etc., etc.? If Technorati wants to be the King of Metadata, they should offer a Ning-style microformat service that lets anybody with motivation built their own specialized SEO site.

While we're waiting for that, a great independent music SEO engine
could emerge. Just make a groovier version of Edgeio's homepage and copy YouTube's SEO. For a critical mass of media to kick off the project, look no farther than partnerships with FileCargo and SaveFile, which seem to be the PhotoBuckets of Music. At MyBlogLog, our most populous communities center around the big DJ directory (~2000 members so far), and its most highly ranked celebs:  DJ Tiesto,  DJ Paul Van Dyk, Armin Van Buuren, etc. We see ton of people clicking to download legal DJ mixes. Since "6) Linking is the new storage," the music storage companies would benefit tremendously by SEOing the files they host.

[via John Battelle]

Limited Problems This Morning

From 2:30 to 5:30am EDT (GMT - 5), we had a bug that affected several dozen of our tracking users. It is resolved now. If you see an recurrence, please send us an email right away to bugs [at] mybloglog.com.

Warms the heart

I love running across posts like this, because it speaks so clearly to MyBlogLog's goal of connecting authors and readers with each other:

The Net is really small when you think about it.  I recently started using MyBlogLog and I noticed a member named Chanpory checking out my blog and profile.  He authors a site called Life Clever
which is like a GTD type of blog.  I’ve been meaning to check it out in
my spare time after I did more research on the productivity hack of
keeping your desk clean.

Well wouldn’t you know it, after crawling through links I found a blog post called 10 tips for keeping your desk clean and tidy written by Chanpory.  Well I checked out his post and you know what?  He’s got some great tips which all of us can use...

When you get to know the people who visit a site, you are likely to learn about a lot of cool and relevant things.

Comment Profiles are beginning to hit their stride

I wanted to give everyone a quick update on the comment profiles since we're getting so many inquiries.  We're getting mighty close for primetime on Typepad blogs, and we're making loads of progress with Wordpress and MT blogs.

We've opted to turn off the comment header for the time being, because while it's a useful feature (explaining that you can get your profile in the comments by signing up for MyBlogLog), it doubles the layout challenges and it should really be in the native language.  So look for it as a configurable option in the future once we've got the comment profiles on cruise control.

Here's a list of who's using the comment profiles right now, by platform.  If you want to get on the shortlist and be the envy of all your blogging buddies, just post a comment below andsay you want in.

Typepad:

• A VC 
• Consuming Ambitions
• DamDam's World
• Evidence in Motion
• Loic Le Meur blog (and in English)
• MyBlogBlog
• RVA Business
• Software Only
• This is Going to be Big

Wordpress:

• Breebop
• Greg Cohn
• Theory.IsTheReason

Movable Type:

• Feld Thoughts

We’re close to beta testing comment / profile integration — wanna help?

Some of our most sucessful users have found that regular mentions in
their blog posts has kept their community highly visible to their
readers.  Meanwhile, we're actively working on new ways of integrating your community with your web site, in classic MyBlogLog hands-free style.   The more ways we can automatically reinforce your community, the more time you can focus on making a kick-ass site based upon the great user information generated by your community members.

Shortly, we'll be rolling out automatic profile / comment integration.  Anyone who has a MyBlogLog account can have their picture and profile link show up next to their comments on your blog.  We've got a number of friends at Six Apart so we're integrating with Typepad first.  Other blogs and comment providers will follow shortly.

If you have a TypePad-hosted blog and would like to take part in the beta test, post a comment below and let me know.  We'll get back to you within the next two weeks with information on how to turn this new feature on and see how it works with your comments and readers.  Also, if you are at one of the other blog providers and want to see yourself at the front of the queue for future comment integration, drop me a line at eric@mybloglog.com and we'll get you hooked up.

MyBlogLog back and tracking

Our hosting provider has sorted their DNS issues and we are once again tracking for everyone.  As promised, we are looking into several mechanisms to ensure this doesn't happen again and I will post details for comments as soon as we have a plan laid out.

MyBlogLog experiencing technical difficulties

We know that the site is not responding and is slowing some of your sites down.  Server Beach, our hosting provider, is experiencing substantial DNS isues that seems to be making several of our servers inaccessible.  We are working with them to get this sorted ASAP.

In the meantime, we are turning off the track.mybloglog.com servers which should fix any page loading issues you are experiencing.  We'll lose a bit of data, but your sites will work again.  Rest assured we will have a new failsafe that accomodates DNS failure next week.  I will post the failsafe solution as soon as it is available.

In the meantime, please send email to eric@mybloglog.com if you are still experiencing slowdown on your site.

Eric

Rock on — Rosie is using us

Maybe I'm just a little too excited about Rosie O'Donnell using MyBlogLog, but I don't think so.  Rosie is cool, her blog is cool and her readers are cool -- because I can't imagine that a single one of her readers falls into Josh Kopelman's 53,651.  These aren't Techcrunch readers; these are people who watch daytime TV and they would be great members of MyBlogLog Communities in the coming months.

If you haven't been to www.rosie.com, I  suggest checking it out.  Her haiku-like posts seem a little odd at first (I'm guessing she blogs from a Blackberry) but then I read the Ask Ro section and began to appreciate her hidden genius.  Love that she is a part of the network.

Someone from Echoditto needs to contact me, stat.  We should talk.