Library clips

I’ve been meaning to blog about this community service for a while, see Elsua’s posts about MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog seems to extend your blog relationships, that is, once someone visits, leaves a comment or trackback on your blog, it ends there. MyBlogLog attempts to extend the notion of a blog community by inviting people to join your blog community, basically these people are members of your blog. This webpage also displays an image of the latest people who have visited your blog, which also comes as a widget. Other features are a message board, site stats and popular links.

So I guess the idea is like a social network around your blog, maybe it’s like Sponit, but the blog content is made from outside the system.

The only benefits I see is that you are part of a network, meaning you are promoting your blog, and you may discover new blogs…plus it is a way for people to say they like you even though they may not link or comment on your blog.
But there must be another way people can benefit by being part of your network, firstly the comments need to be threaded and offer feeds, ie. is it for conversation or is it for a one time comment.

Or maybe it is just that simple, putting a face to people who come in contact with your blog, but this is limited to people who are a part of the MyBlogLog community.
But this is all we have as I can’t put a face to each of my Feedburner subscribers or page visitors, and then discover their blog and the blogs of their communities.

The main idea of a social network is to author content and add friends and communicate with these friends…MyBlogLog does not author content, but it does allow you to discover other people (thus their blog), and add friends, and leave messages.
I guess it could consider re-syndicating blog content for each blog, and perhaps collect a comments archive and an inlinks archive. If only you could gather readers of your blog from the subscription web…then you could really view a community based on your readers, comments and inlinks, plus comments you make elsewhere, and your outlinks.
In this respect, MyBlogLog could be a type of identity service like Lijit, Ziki, mugshot…

The ultimate would be for a 3rd party service to gather a list of people who subscribe to your feed, the old school email subscription list, is this a job for Feedburner.

Tangent

By the way, you could have a 1000 people subscribed to your feed, but how do you know if they are actually reading your feed, that is clicking on items in your feed, or just marking all as read…I think Feedburner may track clicks on items from within a feed.

Moreso, perhaps some people have abandoned their RSS Readers, making it look like you have a subscriber, but they never check their RSS Reader.
On this point I have various RSS Readers myself I have abandoned, which I have loaded up my OPML, eg. if I have abandoned 5 RSS Readers, this means each feed is subscribed to 5 times, these 5 subscriptions are not followed, therefore making the subscriber count for each feed inaccurate in real terms.

NOTE: This is less likely to happen with email subscriptions as people use their email for other stuff, not just for keeping up with the latest blog content, so if they don’t want to read you they will unsubscribe, unless they put up with deleting email messages they don’t want to read (if you don’t unsubscribe to something you no longer want to read, this is like self-spamming).

Back to it

Ideally I can be the centre and my RSS subscribers can be all around me, I click on one and view their profile and people who subscribe to their feed. Besides my RSS subscribers being all around me, my network could also include people that visit my page, but I can’t see where these profiles will come from, unlike the RSS subscriber profiles, which are harvested from various RSS Readers (privacy factor).

Another discovery factor could be not only who visits your blog, but who bookmarks your posts, ie. show me the faces of people who go that extra mile and bookmark my posts. These people are as important as people that comment and link to you.

In the end MyBlogLog is about adding friends and discovery, I guess my thing is the completeness…becoming a member of a community is to me similar to subscribing to a blog in your RSS Reader, so it would be great to see an automatic community by harvesting profiles of all your Feedburner subscribers. But this leaves out visitors to your blog, these stats are covered by Feedburners new additional service, but you don’t have a face/profile for visitors.

I’m not sure how I would use MyBlogLog other than seeing who visits my blog regularly, but then I can do this from the widgit.

What would keep me going to the website itself…maybe to discover new blogs from my latest readers, or new blogs in my community or in the communities I have joined. Maybe an inhouse RSS Reader would keep people visiting the site everyday, and perhaps sharing links with people of your community.

I guess in the end it does what Feedburner can’t do, put a face to your subscribers or visitors, and then check out their profiles, and communities they are in…discovery, discovery!

Here is the Library clips blog community.
You don’t get any really direct benefit by joining my community, but you do get benefit by joining MyBlogLog in general as it is a chance to discover new blogs, and for lurkers to show their face (people that read you, but don’t link to you or comment).

I also have a profile page, but I don’t see why these pages can’t be merged. It just seems natural if I add someone as a fan/friend that I would want to join their community, at the moment you have to do this twice.

As Luis says, what it does well is:

“…keep track of the different folks who keep coming to your weblog on a regular basis in such a way that over time you can build up a sense of the community of folks who get to read of your weblog posts. This is particular handy for those weblogs where there are not many comments shared, but a good readership. This reason alone would give you a good check on who gets to read you and who is interested in what you have got to say. Plus you can keep track of stats, too, if you wish.”

“I do know that there are a number of folks who read my weblog on a regular basis, based on the comments shared or IM or e-mails. However, I know as well that there is another group of folks who do read my weblog posts, but who prefer to actually keep a low profile, for whatever the reason. So with MyBlogLog I get to know those; who they are, where they come from, what their own weblogs are, those other folks who read from their weblogs, etc. etc.”