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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
MyBlogLog had the pleasure this week to sponsor and attend the very first REbarCamp here in San Francisco. In honor of the event, we thought it was about time we showed some love to our rockin’ real estate blogger community!
Many of those in the real estate business already know that MyBlogLog offers all the right tools to help stay connected, and now we made it even more useful! Since Trulia and Zillow added RSS feeds to their profiles, we're now crawling those profiles for new information every hour and feeding that into your New with Me feed where it gets syndicated along with all the other content that you share on MyBlogLog.
For Trulia, we pull in any answers you've given to questions asked on Trulia. For Zillow, we pull in any new listings you add on Zillow. Speaking with both companies today, it looks like they'll be sharing more content via RSS so when it makes sense, we'll add those too.
If you have a Trulia or Zillow account, hop on over to the Services tab and add your ID and we'll take it from there. If you have your own site, you can also list these services in your About Me widget and show everyone your latest activity.
Its a big world out there online, but MyBlogLog can help keep you connected. I think of the web as a huge city, with little neighborhoods that people hang out. The photographers are all kicking it at flickr, the chatterboxes are tweeting away at Twitter, and you got your musicians over at last.fm rocking out. MyBlogLog Connector makes it easier to be an online social butterfly and get connected with what's going on in Internet City.
We first gave you a place to show off what you are up to with New With Me, and gave you the tools to find out what places you hang out at. Then we took that one step farther by delivering you the updates online that are most interesting to you in New With My World, all the buzz online, based on what you have told us is cool.
Then it was time to mingle. Friender showed you who all the cool people are that live with you in Internet City, your friends of friends of friends. We help you make that initial handshake, "Hey! You know Jane too? No way! She's one of my best friends! We definitely should hang out". And with New with My Neighborhood, we kept you in the loop to what they were up to.
So now that we showed you what was going on in your city and introduced you to the people that you need to know. We are taking that last step further and showing you the neighborhoods where your friends hang out, and giving you the tools so you can hook up and hang out there together!
Check out Connector. Your own personal online social directory of where all your friends are! We give you a list of all the people you consider a contact, and all the social web sites they are using. We not only tell you the places they hang out, but the exact table they are sitting at. For now, making that first impression is up to you. We will point you to them, but its up to you to go over and sit down.
How does it work? Let's say you are connected with Jane on MyBlogLog and are chatting it up with her on twitter and sharing photos on flickr. Connector looks at the public friends lists on del.icio.us, Pownce, Digg, Last.fm, and YouTube to see if you're connected there as well. If you and Jane have shared your third party identities on these services on your MyBlogLog profile, we'll do the work to figure out if you're connected or not. If not, the green plus icon will take you to their page where you can connect (once direct authentication is supported, we'll build in-line friending). That's it! Now you can share links, music, and videos and stay that much more in touch with your friends. Use Connector to fill in the gaps in your personal social network.
Its a small (online) world after all.
Is your email inbox starting to look like you have been hearing way too much from MyBlogLog recently? It's ok, you can tell us to turn it down a notch.
It's awesome to have a lot of friends, and even more so being active in the hottest blog communities. But with messages coming in from other MyBlogLog members & the communities you follow, on top of your many friend requests and updates, we understand that sometimes all those alerts can be a bit much.
Head over to your MyBlogLog profile and check out your Account Settings. All the way on the bottom, we have given you the option only send you the scoop on the updates you really need. Go ahead and let us know us to only shoot you an email when you get a message from another member, receive a friend request, community messages or if we send you a system notification.
Drop us a line if you need any help!
XOXO,
Tilly
If you upgraded to the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows (9.0, Beta), you may have noticed a new type of status message next to your contacts which shows the latest articles they may have Buzz'd or changes made to their Yahoo Avatar.
Starting tonight, MyBlogLog is feeding in MyBlogLog activity (adding contacts, joining communities, tagging) as well as your most recent blog posts into Messenger as well. What's cool about this is that it makes your Messenger contact list really come alive, transforming it into a socially aware RSS Reader.
Now, before you IM your friend about the Celtics last night you can read their scathing blog post and adjust accordingly. Likewise, you can post to your blog and automatically notify everyone on your IM list that you're not in a particularly good mood this morning.
MyBlogLog is lifestreaming your lifestream.
We've got a ton of new information for you guys to share on your profiles! We just added ThisNext, Magnolia and FriendFeed to our list of services that we use to feed New with Me.
MyBlogLog now displays all of your FriendFeed comments and likes as well as updates from other services that you have added to FriendFeed. With comments, we've been looking for a way to highlight the great discussions going on at FriendFeed. Sharing your comments are a great way to point people to your activity over there. For the additional services, we do the de-duping for you so if you've got your flickr ID on both FriendFeed and MyBlogLog, not to worry, we'll filter out the duplicates from FriendFeed and keep it fresh. If it's a service we don't carry, such as a GTalk status messages, all the more grist for the mill.
Wanna share shopping recommendations? Load your ThisNext ID into your services and let people know what's on your list!
Last but not least, you can finally show off all those cool bookmarks you've been saving on Magnolia too!
It's now really easy to refresh the thumbnail screenshot of your site on MyBlogLog. We added a link that will instruct our mini-robots to surf on over to your site, take a mini-screenshot on their mini-browsers and upload it for you to your community page.
Look for the link on your site's "Settings" page, click refresh to add you URL to the queue or "upload" if you want to roll your own.
Now's your chance, refresh your screenshot and let's get rid of those ugly, grey boxes!
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