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!

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.

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.

Disqus and Intense Debate added to MyBlogLog

Hey everyone! We just added fields for you to add your Disqus and Intense Debate IDs to your profile's Services tab. We're just collecting names for now which will add the icon & pointer on your MyBlogLog profile page, email signature and About Me widgets. We are building support to include your comments into your New with Me page in the near future.

Stay tuned.

Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog

Every blogger knows that most of their traffic comes via referrals. Whether it's from a search engine, link from another blog, or via a tinyurl embedded in someone's tweet - readers flow across your site dropping by to graze on something that caught their eye then are off again just as quickly as they came.

Various plug-ins are out there to give readers a reason to hang out a bit longer on your site. Some of them present a list of similar posts from your archives, another creates a dynamic list of all-time popular posts so the viewers can browse your greatest hits.

Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.

Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user's profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog's archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.

The plug-in is configurable. You can also weight the recency and tag matching logic to determine the headlines you'd like to show. The idea is to engage readers with related content that's of interest to them. It's an innovation that cannot really be appreciated until you see how it performs for different users. Below are two sets of headlines presented by the Just for You plug-in from my personal blog, everwas by two different users.

Top tags are MyBlogLog and Yahoo!

Top tags are Alameda and Japan

If the reader is not a MyBlogLog user, Just for You will present a list of headlines using the collective tags of recent MyBlogLog visitors which it uses as a proxy to determine interests of the current reader. Just for You was built by Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni from our Yahoo! Bangalore offices who took the original concept and added much of their own semantic matching pixie dust. A patent has been filed.

Powering Just for You is The MyBlogLog API which is completely open so that developers can build hooks in to take advantage what MyBlogLog users share on their profile. Take a look at what Lijit (adds your blog url on signup page) and Thingfo (pre-filling in registration fields) are doing to personalize the user experience. As Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says in his post about Just for You,

Just For You is a great example of what this API can do. There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free and base recommendations on the self-identified interests of their readers. That's really powerful.

If you're a MyBlogLog user, visit everwas.com and see what comes up in the Just for You box in the sidebar. If you're running a hosted WordPress blog, install the plug-in and let us know with a trackback to this post so we can follow it over to your blog and leave comments on your post on what comes up for each of us.

MyBlogLog gets you Buzzin’ and LinkedIn

One of the best parts about being a part of the Yahoo family is not only the free snacks and soda pop, but we also get dibs on all the great content they provide! The first of many Yahoo services that MyBlogLog now has the chance to re-syndicate is from Yahoo Buzz. Buzz gives you the opportunity to either “Buzz up” or “Buzz Down” interesting links and news stories, and depending on the ranking, it may be featured on the Yahoo homepage! Enabling Yahoo updates from your MyBlogLog service page will broadcast all the stories that you have been buzzing about!

Head on over to your MyBlogLog services page and flip the switch to enable Yahoo updates. This will tell Yahoo that you have given MyBlogLog the a-ok to pull in and re-publish all the services Yahoo offers to be broadcast. To edit the Yahoo services that you wish to broadcast, you will have to visit their updates page and pick and choose from there. At this time, we are only pulling in Yahoo Buzz, but stay tuned for more services popping up soon!

Not to be outshined is the addition of LinkedIn updates to your New With Me stream that also goes live today. Plug in your LinkedIn ID to the Services page and we will pick up any changes to your Headline (the only public data they currently syndicate) on our weekly Sunday evening pull and let the world know when you got that promotion!

MyBlogLog, a long overdue site redesign!

You know in the movies when they get the nerdy girl to untie her ponytail and remove her glasses? All of a sudden she’s the hottest chick at school? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. We always knew MyBlogLog was one hot little number, now she’s got the look to prove it.

Don’t worry, we still got all the features that you can't live without; your stats, your widgets and, of course, the New With stuff. Only now everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who's been checking you out.

Just for funsies, you should head over and check out the welcome screen for logged out or unregistered users. We went and completely upgraded the featured blogs by scrolling through the top 20 sites (based on number of members), and displaying a more straightforward message about what we offer; Discover, Broadcast, and Connect. You're going to hear these three words more often from us, I'd love to hear if this description it resonates with you.

Of course this new look for MyBlogLog couldn’t have been completed without help from our amazing muse, Jaime Sonoda, who we smooth-talked into sparing us some cycles, and the designing skillz of our man Manny. Together they created quite the slick design.

So jump in there and give it a look around. Let us know what you think!