What's Your Opinion of MyBlogLog

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[Ben Barden]

*editing this as the thread has been split*

What do you think of MyBlogLog?  I have just posted a review on my blog: Blogging Networks: MyBlogLog

In my opinion, there isn't much you can do with it... people add me, I add them back, I get an occasional "shout" on my profile... that's about it really.  As with BlogCatalog, it's a site that I'm a member of because most other people use it too... but I don't get much out of it. Though I do like to see who is visiting my site (the block of avatars on my home page is ok).

[Meg]

Yes, it used to be a lot better (a year ago). Now I maintain it for the social aspect of the widget...

[Mike]

I really should take a bit of a closer look though because there are undoubtedly aspects of the site I'd find useful - I've just got so many accounts across the web I have trouble keeping track of them all

It seems to me that this tool is gaining in popularity though.  Do you think that's true or has it always been popular and I've only just started paying attention?

I'm pretty clueless tonight - bear with me

[Ben Barden]

Meg, what was better about it then?  My blog is only a couple of months old (although the website goes back several years).

[Meg]

Well, it wasn't as "spammy" in that they didn't allow community messaging (imagine you had joined 300 communities and all of a sudden a large percentage start to message all their *members*. They annoyed a lot of people by introducing that with no *opt in*  and you either had to get ALL messages or NO messages. It was also used more for legitimate communication for bloggers, but people got so overwhelmed with "hey, I've just posted to my blog" type messages it was impossible to leave messaging on. MBL were also critical of people who joined "too many communities" - IMO, that's kind of the idea behind social networks.... In doing so they ostracised many members.

I used to use it a lot more for discovery, then people abused it with the "great blog, come and visit mine"  or "thanks for visiting, do come back" type comments. And the spam reporting system is pretty woeful. Then they introduced the Yahoo sign in....

In all fairness though, it could just be a legitimate phase that bloggers go through (ie wow blogging, how can I find other bloggers?), but once your feedreader starts groaning at the seams and you constantly see 1000+ unread items you "back off" the discovery phase to an extent and start rationalising...

So, what I'm saying is that maybe I'm just more at *info overload* than "it's not as good as it used to be" - and consequently I'm rationalising the social networks that I don't have time for. If that makes sense?

[Ben Barden]

Thanks Meg for the explanation. Makes sense. Thinking about it, I may remove the grid of MyBlogLog avatars from my site but keep the tracking code there for a bit.  I quite like their daily stats but that's all I look at there.

[guera]

I quite like the block of who's visited recently but I don't really use it for anything else. I seem to get more traffic from Blog Catalog than from My Blog Log, which as far as I can see is the same sort of thing.

I am bit wary of the people who add me as a friend and themselves have thousands of friends. I figure they are adding everyone they come across in the hope of more traffic. I usually ignore the messages that say, Great site, come and visit mine.

[Sueblimely]

MyBlogLog was the first of its kind if I remember rightly - Bumpzee and others came later and BlogCatalog changed its format to become a similar social networking site. Add the StumbleUpon, Sphinn type sites and it becomes harder to concentrate efforts on MBL - This in addition to what Meg says makes it less useful than it used to be.

[Ben Barden]

It's interesting to hear everyone's input.  This has prompted me to write a review of MyBlogLog, which I have had in my mind for a few weeks now.  It's now on my blog - see what you think.