DISQUS

The old widget code is there via a link to "Looking for the old-school Recent Reader widget? Find it here." up at the top of the page behind your blog community's link for "widgets"

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/r3fresh...

Ian

Correction - the person you were reporting before *is* on your Block List. If you are still getting friend requests from this person, please let me know because we are unable to reproduce what is obviously a bug.

We had tested and confirmed a fix, obviously this isn't the case!

Ian

Hi Jordon,

I'm so sorry you are still getting un-prompted contact emails. If they are from the same member that you reported was sending you email a few weeks ago, I just checked and confirmed that they *are not* on your Block List.

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/mem_hidel...

Go to the last message that you received and Click on [Report Spam] to add them to your Block List and you should never get an email or friend request from them again.

Ian
Product Guy, MyBlogLog

Glad to have you back! Jackie, thanks for making the connection.
Incidentally, Jackie did a quick interview with me at the recent Web 2.0 Expo on how one might use MyBlogLog with a marketing campaign. [http://qik.com/video/64162]

I wish that my delicious links didn't show up on the /discussion page - I don't think my annotations belong in there as "comments"

Love the re-design by the way. It must be Spring!

I believe this has to do with the way our caching is set up. We'll take a look at this and get back to you in these comments.

Ian
MyBlogLog

Minor correction - not "too be added to MyBlogLog" but, "already in production"

;-)

Oops. Their intentions are good but execution clearly failed here. I'm passing this one on to the folks that help us out in Customer Care. We clearly need to do better here.

Further to what Julian Bond mentions about rich About Me pages, have a look at the new MyBlogLog in-page widget which pulls in your updates from the various services that you aggregate on MyBlogLog and makes it available for the body of your About Me page.

See it in action on my WP blog at:
http://everwas.com/about

It also works in TypePad where I hijacked the Biography field to put in the New with Me script:
http://iankennedy.typepad.com/about.html

You can pick up your widget code on MyBlogLog
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/e_widget_newwithm...

MyBlogLog launched its Lifestreaming widget today!

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/03...

These are all really good points. I just had a fascinating discussion with an academic at University of Texas that networks such as Facebook, FriendFeed and, yes, even MyBlogLog begin to devalue the word "friend"

Aggregation of events is a technical problem that is basically solved. What is more interesting and will be the next venue for innovation is what to do with all the aggregated events and how to filter though them in a way that adds value.

I also find it ironic that the Google Ads that are shown next to your article advertise ways to "promote your blog" and "wanna get rich blogging" - an example of a matching algorithm not tuned to the nuances of its audience.

Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

Hi Andy,

Thank you for the feedback, yes, it is constructive. Just want to make clear that we were not working on this for eight months. When priorities shifted, we put this on the back burner while we worked on other things.

Couple of notes.

Twitter urls not clickable - good suggestion!

StumbleUpon - the duplicate looks like an artifact particular to the example you saw, I'll continue to monitor it

Tags: We want to use tags on updates as a vector across members and sites featured on MyBlogLog. The idea is that if you want to drill down on content back at the source, you'd click through the headline to get to that source post and any actions attached to it. I can see why it's unexpected behavior, I'm open to other presentations.

Comments: I'm totally with you on this. I'm not a fan of spawning yet another disconnected pocket of conversations. It's important to tie it together with the source material somehow. If you cannot, then don't do it.

Also, I looked for the Facebook integration on FriendFeed but couldn't find it.

All the best,

Ian

PS.
The TechCrunch link goes to the wrong article. The one you need is:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/29/yahoos-myb...

I think you mean "Blogcatalog partnered with SezWho" not MyBlogLog.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the write-up.

You hit the nail on the head about lifestreaming being more of a feature and less a product in it's own right. We built New with Me from the start as a flowing river of pointers to content and not a repository. We want this to be a place to browse updates from people you know. Whenever you want to interact with that content in any way (favorite a photo, comment on a blog post, drill back to an archive or profile) we send the user back to the originating site.

For more on the thinking behind this feature, see my post on the topic:

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02...

See you in San Diego!

Ian

hi joe,

two widgets seem to come up side by side on this post.

ian

Sorry you don't like the new blog - oh well, different strokes. . .

If the flyouts annoy, you can disable them on the configuration page by selecting "none" on the Flyout orientation dropdown.

Also, the old widget is still there for those that want to customize the CSS. Look for the link in the red box on the top of the widget configuration page.

FYI, we'll be adding instructions in the near future on how you can customize this new widget too.

Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

The checkmarks for verified sites are now there on the flyouts for the new Recent Reader widget. Thanks again for the suggestion.

Ian

Hi Nick,

We debated the various merits of opt-in and opt-out but finally decided on opt-out because of the unique nature of MyBlogLog. Most of the activity on MyBlogLog happens in the widgets, a small percentage of users make it back to the site. If we chose to go with an opt-in, it would take a long time for people to catch on and the real value of New with Me comes from a critical mass of users adopting it.

We looked closely at the Facebook Beacon reaction and felt the biggest issue was lack of control. The opt-out pop-up disappeared too quickly and there was, initially, no means to opt-out on the site itself. We took these lessons to heart and have built in controls which a user can use to quickly opt-out and control what they share. By sending the email blast, posting it on our blog, and coverage and discussion from folks like yourself, we hope that we can arrive at a solution that doesn't take anyone by surprise.

Ian Kennedy
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

Hi,

We saw your earlier post about the verification checkmark and, as I noted in the comments, it was never surfaced on the earlier Recent Reader widget nor is it there on the new one.

That said, the team discussed it yesterday after your post and it's pretty easy to get it added and brings some value to the viewers of the widget. Keep your eyes out for the checkmark to appear in the new widget flyout in the near future.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

The check mark showing verification is still an important part of your community profile. If you click though to my community on http://everwas.com (which features the new widget) you'll see that it goes to my community page which still features the widget.

We never featured the check mark on the old widget.

Ian Kennedy
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

The code's fixed. You need to go back into MyBlogLog and hit Get Widgets to get the latest code.

Hope that helps!

Ian

Hi Zoli,

We saw webgrrrl's post and were alerted to the plug-in issue. We're testing a fix and I'll let you know when it's fixed.

Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

Holy crap! Yes, the video is totally worth watching.

Very cool. If you're interested in extending this with data we have in the MyBlogLog API, let me know. For an example of what we've got, check out the API docs:

http://developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog

Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog

(this comment imported into Disqus by Tom Insam on 2008/12/02)

Nice! Me likey! :-)

Nice mashup!

Most likely the network latency is preventing us from recording the current visitor's memberID and making that available via the community.readers.list method in time for you to use the member.find.byservice method to then hop over to another service to pull the preferences you would need in time for an optimal experience.

One thing to play around with is to pull back the collective preferences of your audience (as you have done in your Pipes hack) every hour or so and normalize them to a preference that is customized to the type of readers you attract over the course of the day.