The MyBlogLog Blog

MyBlogLog: We know what’s hot

It’s no secret that MyBlogLog has its finger on the pulse of the online world. With over 450,000 blog communities and roughly 645,000 members, along with the countless services shared, the amount of information we keep an eye on is crazy. Being the data junkies that we are, we have been trying to cook up a way that we can share all this information with you!

We started out first by integrating topics into your New With Me stream, which of course led us to include your personal tags as the topics that power your New With My World. Pretty much, tell us what you are into and MyBlogLog will go out and scour our entire database of tweets, pictures, blog posts and listened tracks to give you everything we can find.

Now it’s a pretty big place out there on the internet, with conversations and activity happening everywhere. How do you find out what everyone is talking about? What are the hottest topics that got everyone a buzz? Take a trip over to the Topics tab and take a peek.

 

Brand new from the labs here at MBL HQ; a moving list of the hottest topics that people are buzzing about in the MyBlogLog universe. And since every morning is a new day of news and information, the things people talk about changes daily. To get a real picture of how these trends move, we thought a handy little graph would help you navigate around quite nicely.

Why was Jennifer Lopez the hottest topic yesterday? Check out the top blogs posts from that day and find out what went down. Wanna check out everything we know about it? Click on the topic and we will tell you the scoop. You interested in Related topics? Other hot news from that day? We got you covered.

Welcome to the beginning to what we call Social Analytics. 

Kick back and watch your online neighborhood stroll by

Your MyBlogLog New With My Neighborhood just got a bit busier! Now in addition to streaming updates with your friends tweets, photos, bookmarks and videos, we flipped the switch and added recent blog posts from your MyBlogLog joined communities into your online neighborhood as well. And since this information auto updates; go ahead and grab a cold one, sit back, and watch your internet neighborhood scroll by

Think of it like your own personal neighborhood newsletter, updating you on the events and buzz going on around in your internet hometown. Just another way that MyBlogLog makes your online world feel more intimate.

MyBlogLog and Zemanta; the 2 most necessary services in your blogger toolbox

How many times have you sat down in your favorite chair, ready to write the epic blog post, only to loose steam halfway through? Seriously, that happens to me all the time, before Zemanta that is.

Start out with an idea, and Zemanta will take over the heavy work by helping you find photos, tags and related links that will take your basic blog post to the next level.

So it was only natural that MyBlogLog and Zemanta would hook up and bring you the hotness. Check out your blog community page, and right there, seamlessly blended in with the RSS feed is Reblog:

Go ahead, go back and browse through your MyBlogLog communities and check up on your favorite blogs. See a blog post that grabs your eye? Clicking Reblog will capture the post that caught your fancy and set you up use it as the inspiration for your own blog update! Pick a quote; add some tags, maybe a photo or two and bingo! There’s your post. Easy peasy lemon squeezy ;)

Making blogging social and turning up the volume for online conversation? Just another way we help bring together everything that a blogger needs in one place!

Signing off. Peace, Out

Some of you have already heard but last Friday was my last day with Yahoo and the MyBlogLog team. An opportunity to point myself in a new direction came my way that was just to compelling to pass up. I want to thank you all for your support during my last year and a half with MyBlogLog. I have had a blast learning from you and it's been amazing experience working with the MyBlogLog team. They are a rare mix of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-just-get-it-done super-brains that have been cranking out new and innovative features on such a regular basis that constantly exceeds expectations. You guys are rock stars.

I am riding off into the sunset but the product is in good hands.

Tilly, our ever bubbly Community Manager, will continue to be your regularly scheduled hostess for all things MyBlogLog. She's been hard at work bringing the Yahoo Customer Care folks up to speed on how we do things so that she can have a little help from people that truly can help.

Todd will take the tiller of the good ship MBL which should be second nature to him as he was one of the blokes who dreamed up this whole thing in the beginning.

There are some really cool things in the queue, some still on the drawing board, others tucked away on dev servers where they are incubating. In case you haven't noticed, the market has gone haywire so many things are in a holding pattern until the team is allowed to staff up again to fully support what they've built. I won't steal Tilly's thunder as she's itching to introduce these new features herself but I hope, as a customer of MyBlogLog, that these new features come to light sooner rather than later.

So see you all around. I'll still be hanging out on MyBlogLog but as a fellow member, not one of the inner circle.

Unplanned Service Outage

1:03 pm

We are experiencing technical difficulties at this time and are working to get to the bottom of it. Symptoms include:

• Recent Reader is blank, no faces.
• New with Me, New with My Neighborhood, and New with My World lifestreams are down.
• Faces are not showing up on community member, contact listings or friender.

I'll refresh this post with updates.

2:55 pm

We're bringing things back up. Faces should be flowing back in and we're re-generating the lifestreams. We're sweeping up the shattered glass.

3:10 pm

Unfortunately, due to the outage, any traffic to your blog between 1pm and 2:45 or so was not recorded and cannot be recovered. Sorry everyone, we'll try to suck less next time.

Services update: MyBlogLog welcomes Brightkite, Slideshare and Reddit

I am thrilled to announce the debut of Brightkite and Slideshare on the MyBlogLog services list! Now if you update Brightkite with your location, photos or comments, or if you share a presentation using Slideshare we will display those events in your lifestream.

Brightkite is still an invite only beta service, so for those of you that are not yet signed up, don’t worry, your girl Tilly got your back. Leave us a comment with your email address and we can get you access into the Brightkite community. Once you’re in, all you got to do is send Brightkite an update with your location, either on the web or via SMS, and they will update where you are and alert you to the people that have checked in around you. Post pictures, add comments, and find out what’s happening based on your location!

And if you are a member of the Reddit community we have love for you too! Drop your Reddit username into the services page, and for now we will keep ahold of that as a placemark, but in the next upcoming weeks, you will start to see your links and comments show up as well.

MyBlogLog is Hiring

Do you like seeing your handiwork featured on hundreds of thousands of blogs? Do you thrive off discovering the shared insights of a distributed global network of voracious blog readers? Are you interested in crafting a UI that will help our members make sense of the thousands of tweets, photos, music tracks, and web links that they share with the world? Did you enjoy connect-a-dot drawings as a kid and seeing patterns emerge from the chaos? More importantly, did you color outside the lines?

We're looking for a few hotshot front end engineers help us build the next generation, social analytics dashboard. We're a small, rapid deployment team operating within the larger Yahoo! organization that gets things done. Shred a Photoshop file, wireframe in CSS, bolt on distributed web services - idea on Monday, production by Thursday, this is us.

The position is based in downtown San Francisco.

Responsibilities include:

* Coding and testing new PHP/MySQL applications
* Architecting, coding and testing new JavaScript based site widgets
* Testing and improving existing MyBlogLog sites and widgets

Minimum Job Qualifications:

* 5+ years experience in PHP/MySQL development
* 4+ years experience JavaScript/DOM programming
* Strong knowledge of security best practices.
* Strong work ethic and desire to help contribute to the future success of MyBlogLog

Preferred Job Qualifications:

* Entrepreneurial spirit to run in a startup within a larger organization
* Experience in agile, test-driven software development
* A passion for emerging technology

Software Development Engineer
Senior Software Development Engineer

Pownce, ThisNext wishlists, Diigo, TipJoy and MisterWong

Our out of town MyBlogLog family members have been working double time this week! Not only have Mani and Saurabh hooked you up with the IntenseDebate and Disqus goodness for your lifestream, but just for good measure, they added Pownce, ThisNext wishlists and, If you have already given us your FriendFeed ID, you will start to see your updates from Diigo, TipJoy and Mister Wong as well!

Update your IDs on your services page to get started!

Disqus and IntenseDebate added to MyBlogLog's lifestream

Last week we posted here that MyBlogLog added a place in the Profile to include Disqus and IntenseDebate. Today we've turned on our extractors so that comments you make on either service will make their way into your New with Me lifestream. This will supplement the MyBlogLog comments you leave on MyBlogLog-enabled sites today that are already part of your lifestream if you've "enabled" it on the Services tab in your Profile.

Both services are growing like weeds as they each offer advantages over plain old comment systems that come bundled with your blogging platform.

• centralized comments across multiple blogs so they are better equipped to tackle spam proactively across the community, removing the need for you to actively moderate spam on your own.
• reputation ranking and threaded commenting so your readers can better filter and follow conversations.
• hosted comments so that if you ever change domain urls or (*eek*) lose your comments, there's easy recovery

If you don't have a profile on these services, sign up today and add your profile ID to MyBlogLog. If you run a blog, be sure to check out Intense Debate and Disqus and add either one to your site today.

Todd is running Disqus on toddsampson.com and I'm running Intense Debate on everwas.com so you can see them in action. We'll be adding Intense Debate to the MyBlogLog blog shortly as a favor to Todd's TechStars connection but check out each one and choose your favorite.

Some widget love using the MyBlogLog API

OK, so this might just be the pretty much the most rad thing I have ever seen. Using the MyBlogLog API, check out what MBL member KeyJ63 created! 

At first glance it looks like our normal run of the mill Recent Reader widget. You got your recent visitors, a link to join the community and all that jazz. But oh? What is this community tab up top?  Clicking on that will pop up an entire screen of awesome.

So in the center there you got your blog community, surrounded by the community’s most recent readers. And from each of those readers, you can see the blog communities they are a member of, and follow the paths and you can find the blogs that your readers have in common.

But the hotness doesn’t stop there. Not only can you drag around the readers and blogs around the screen, go ahead and try double clicking on any of the icons. As if by magic the whole thing mixes up and arranges everything to focus on the selected reader or blog. And if that is not enough, select a reader and up springs a site bio, or select blog and a little window appears and shows you the Alexa page rank and traffic stats.  I don’t know about you, but I am definitely super impressed!

Kudos! You totally rock!