Disqus - Latest Comments for Eric Marcoullier

Re: Web Free.0 – yes!

Eric Marcoullier — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:33:52 -0000

They're going to make it up in volume, Howard :)

Re: Blogging Tools market is heating up AND how to make a WEB 2.0 Community work!

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:30:06 -0000

Howard --

Thanks for the kind words. I definitely owe you a phone call.

Candice --

I'd like to clarify a bit about what we're doing. MyBlogLog hasn't added online community functionality because it's the latest trend or in order to lock users in. Our mission statement is to enable authors to become more intimate with their readers. We're taking the next logical step from tracking what links are clicked to who's clicking those links. And because we are already on 20,000+ blogs and sites, we can start to create some very compelling data for you to mine about what your users are clicking elsewhere. Does that ring true to you?

Re: Slowness

Eric Marcoullier — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 10:23:21 -0000

Gav --

I am very sorry that we slowed down your site. One of our reader roll servers went down this morning and we didn't get notified. You should find it much more speedy now. We are constantly working on improving this so that there is no chance for slowdown.

Cheers!
Eric

Re: http://www.rev2.org/2006/06/21/mybloglog-communites-social-networking-for-readers/

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:52:39 -0000

Sid --

Thanks for the kind words. This is one of those rare cases where it's fantastic to be called utterly obvious.

We're still beta (old school beta, where you were actually beating on new features and getting core functionality right, as opposed to new school beta, where you don't have the cajones to call it 1.0) so there's a ton of improvements on the way before we launch.

Our goal is to create a greater sense of intimacy between authors and readers (and amongst readers) and this framework is really just the tip of the iceberg. Give us a little while longer and we'll knock your socks off.

Re: How To Use MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:51:08 -0000

Awesome post, Steve. We've been running so hard that we haven't always been clear about how to best take advantage of what we're building. This is a great primer for anyone new to MyBlogLog. Take care!

Re: MyBlogLog Plutoed?

Eric Marcoullier — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:44:54 -0000

Andy -- we're going to continue working hard this year to keep the signal to noise ratio as high as possible. Over the holidays last month we released a feature that lets you only see messages from your own contacts and I think this will help. As always, suggestions on how we can do better are encouraged.

Re: MyBlogLog Plutoed?

Eric Marcoullier — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:44:54 -0000

Re: How to Use MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:52:14 -0000

Andy -- thanks for reinforcing that it's two-way conversation (as opposed to one-way broadcasting) that gives MBL whatever power people imbue it with.

James -- We are working hard to come up with novel ways to keep spam from becoming insurmountable. It is our hope that enabling you to filter out messages from non-contacts will hide a lot of the spam sent. We're also beginning to investigate ways of sorting community members and contacts based upon likely usefulness. More on that in the coming months.

Re: How to Use MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:52:14 -0000

Re: MyBlogLog News (significant)

Eric Marcoullier — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 11:41:09 -0000

Andy -- I'd appreciate your take, either publicly or online, on the 20 message per day thing. What's stressing me out is that no one seems to be taking the time to read the post that their commenting on.

What people seem to be missing is that the limit is 20 *unreciprocated* messages per day. The goal is to limit the number of spammy "please check out my community messages" sent but leave a clear path for real communication. Thoughts?

Re: MyBlogLog News (significant)

Eric Marcoullier — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 11:41:09 -0000

Re: The Ultimate Way To Show Reader Appreciation

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:19:40 -0000

Andy -- thanks for noticing the speedup. Shiny new boxes make MyBlogLog team happy!

Re: The Ultimate Way To Show Reader Appreciation

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:19:40 -0000

Andy -- thanks for noticing the speedup. Shiny new boxes make MyBlogLog team happy!

Re: SchMOe – I Tagged Myself on MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:08:25 -0000

Andy --

Totally agree with you on skipping the theatrics. You've raised some really good issues and I'd like to respond:

Why use Del.icio.us formatting?
You listed a bunch of different examples for "blogging tips" tags, but you left off the one that many expert taggers use: "bloggingtips". Since we're aggregating tags from multiple sources (and what you see now is just the tip of the iceberg) we need to store them in the format that has the best chance of a future match. It's easy to remove spaces and special characters but adding them, not so much.

Why use Technorati?
Why not? They're a great service and we dig the people there. They provide a great service to their members and have an awesome API. What am I missing?

Use data from feeds
That's a really interesting idea. Right now we're not actually capturing any of the data in the feed so it would require some extra work, but the idea has been added to the "future development" list.

Re: SchMOe – I Tagged Myself on MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:08:25 -0000

Re: Building Your Blog’s Community Using MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:04:19 -0000

Heya dt --

We're spending some serious cycles right now trying to make the existing site more intuitive. When you say that some of the things are difficult to see, are you mainly talking about the white on orange or are you saying that the buttons are in unintuitive places?

Surprisingly, putting all of the features into one script is bad on many levels. First, separating the scripts enables you to place different widgets in different locations. You may want the Reader Roll way up on the page but the Top 5 elsewhere. Also, it allows you to put the tracking script right after the body tag for optimum effectiveness. Lastly, from a loading perspective, it's far better to break them up because 1) we don't have to run several queries to determine what widgets you have and what settings you;re using and 2) we can load in parallel.

Kevin --

Your last comment is true for just about every startup and it hangs over our head like a virtual Sword of Damacles. We need to reach a critical mass of polish before people get tired of waiting. Hopefully the Communities launch has bought us a bit more time :)

Re: Community Catalysts (or, Thinking About Community Cont’d)

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:30:34 -0000

Fraser -- I think you make some very prescient observations about online communities. In fact, you have described many of the core principles that drive MyBlogLog. We are not trying to be the center of your community -- that's what your blog is for. We're trying to find ways to bring you and your readers closer together. Step one is making everyone aware of each other; step two can be any of the three services you mention -- discovery, personaliztion or communication. But it all has to center around the passionate readers that are waiting to connect around a given blog. The concept of potential energy comes to mind.

Re: Community Catalysts (or, Thinking About Community Cont’d)

Eric Marcoullier — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 09:51:21 -0000

We're in complete agreement -- when I say the Step Two can be "discovery, personalization or communication," I mean just that. It's unique for each reader. Some will want to learn about new links and sites, others will want to make their own profiles exciting and still others will want to connect with fellow readers. We have to make all of those options available and let the reader decide how they want to act. But it's all built on a foundation of awareness of other readers.

Re: MyBlogLog: Community Catalyst (or, Planting The Seeds Of A Disruptive Thoughts Community)

Eric Marcoullier — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:02:48 -0000

Candice and Fraser -- we're looking into why your picture isn't showing up on this page. I'll either post the reason it's not showing up when we know more, or your avatar will show up and I won't waste anyone's time with another post :)

Re: MyBlogLog: Community Catalyst (or, Planting The Seeds Of A Disruptive Thoughts Community)

Eric Marcoullier — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:25:11 -0000

Fixed!

And even though I said I wasn't going to post a followup, I want to clarify something for Candace. You don't need to be logged into MBL in order to have your picture show up -- the reason the picture didn't show up was because the URL from your comment didn't exactly match the URL you entered for it at MyBlogLog (the trailing URL got us).

We want things to be easy. Transparent. Automatic. The goal is that you do the things you already do and now it just has additional value. Your picture shows up in comments. You join communities. And a lot more we're not quite ready to talk about yet ;) Please let us know whenever you feel like we're making you jump through hoops because those are the places where we're not doing our job well enough.

Re: MyBlogLog: Community Catalyst (or, Planting The Seeds Of A Disruptive Thoughts Community)

Eric Marcoullier — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:55:09 -0000

Fraser -- it is a challenge, to say the least. The primary obstacle is that comments are an inherently insecure system. I can post something right now and say I'm you on most any blog on the web. And things like Typekey and OpenID, which are supposed to combat this, don't help because they're all opt-in. And who can blame them -- if you made all your commenters log in via OpenID, you'd have a fraction of the comments.

We're certainly not ready to tackle that problem. Because it's a huge monster, it's going to require integration with every major blog provider, and they don't have any real reason to make it safer for people to operate outside their walled gardens. So yes, faces can exacerbate, but don't create, spoofing issues. Once we reach a certain size I hope we can help address some of the root causes.

Re: 2006/06/19/mybloglog-communities-social-network-for-blog-readers/

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 20:51:52 -0000

Pete --

We're not making any effort to hide MyBlogLog communities, but we're also not really telling anyone about it yet. We're oldschool beta and still a ways away from delivering a complete experience.

If this was all we had up our sleeve, I'd completely agree with you -- what the world needs now is not another generic social network. We've got a couple more weeks of serious work tying together the existing MyBlogLog capabilities with our new Communities framework. In the not too distant future, you can look forwad to a much greater intimacy with your readers.

We'll keep you posted.

Re: Untitled Document

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:36:54 -0000

Hey, thanks for calling this out. We totally overlooked this on the rollout and it was your blog post that caused us to change the config file. Get down with your bad self!

Re: Removing MyBlogLog Widget - Too Slow Today

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 02:41:50 -0000

Hey all -- we're very sorry about today's performance, but things are fixed (as of about 4p PST). We had a server go down, so some members in our third tracking cluster saw some serious slowdown while we got it straightened. One of the benefits of moving to Yahoo!'s infrastructure over the next month is that these occasional problems will become history.

Once again, we're very sorry about the slowdown. We recognize that being on your page is a privilege and we're doing everything we can to give your site the respect it deserves.

Re: Jeremy Zawodny Apologizes

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:39:19 -0000

Andy -- you've always been a great partner and I hope that after some reflection (and maybe a few more jabs between you and Jeremy) you'll come back to MyBlogLog.

I tend to say stupid things when I don't think for a while, so I'm not going to make apologies or say someone was in the right. I can see where you and Jeremy both have valid points. As we continue to grow (knock on wood) we're going to constantly add new developers and new members to the mix and they're all going to have different ideas about MyBlogLog's direction.

At a high level, I think your disagreement represents a very good thing for MyBlogLog. I'd rather that we have members who are invested enough to argue about what's acceptable than folks who sleepwalk through the service and ultimately find themselves somewhere else.

Re: Jeremy Zawodny Apologizes

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:25:48 -0000

Andy --

You've seen all the posts about spam on MyBlogLog. It's not all about sending messages asking members to visit my community. There are members who get pissed at people who make everyone a contact. There are member who get pissed at people who constantly visit other communities so that they show up on the list of "people who recently stopped by" and there are people, like Jeremy, who get pissed when people use their avatars and screenshots for blatant marketing uses (whether it's a guy who makes his avatar a hot woman so that he stands out on a reader roll or a member who uses his screen shot area to entice people to join through a contest).

I think it's perfectly cool for someone to join MyBlogLog and then a month, or a week, or even a day later say "I think that MyBlogLog would be better with tags, or nothing but porn, or no marketing." Punk rock ethos, man :)

Re: Spammers Force MyBlogLog to Update Features

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:06:54 -0000

Almost all of the slowdown on our end can be attributed to two things: Amazon's hosting (which is also going through growing pains) and still being on our budget hosting boxes. Both will be solved by transitioning over to Yahoo's infrastructure, but unfortunately it's not an overnight process.

As Andy beard points out, though, it's quite often the page layout that's the killer and not the widget. As long as the content is up on the screen, the load time is a bit of a non-issue.

http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/mybloglog-spam-hack...

Re: Another MyBlogLog Hack?

Eric Marcoullier — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:25:57 -0000

This was in the process of being closed anyway, so all that happened was we did this tonight instead of tomorrow.

Re: MyBlogLog Reacts to Boycott, Reinstates Shoemoney

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:32:33 -0000

Secure -- I'm breaking my vow of silence about this, because I can't stand hearing that question over and over. The flaw he pointed out was fixed within 45 minutes of Shoe originally posting the story, and we posted this on Shoe's comments. He was too busy updating his post with additional member's data to notice.

Re: MyBlogLog Reacts to Boycott, Reinstates Shoemoney

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:43:26 -0000

Andy --

That's like asking Google how confident they are that people can't game AdSense. I am comfortable saying that no one has ever been able to get to your personal information and that we have instituted a major security improvement to keep people from spoofing cookies. We're working on reducing spam as explained in our recent blog post and we're taking steps to reduce the opportunities for clickfraud.

Are we ever going to keep people from making their avatars voluptuous women for marketing purposes? Probably not.

Are we always going to be ahead of SEO-types (sorry) who want to game the system for their own gain? Probably not.

Is this good enough to be on your site? Only you can say. But I respect your decision either way.

Re: MyBlogLog Reacts to Boycott, Reinstates Shoemoney

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:56:08 -0000

Andy -- MyBlogLog was launched a s away for people to connect with each other, whether it's authors with readers or readers with readers. Immediately we found that people started using us a discovery mechanism and that was awesome. A nice side benefit of that was all the people posting about how much their traffic goes up when they start using us. Yays all around.

But recently, I've seen a load of people complaining about all the "join my community" spam and all the pictures of busty women being used as a lure to bring people to their pages. I'm comfortable saying this is not behavior we want because it's ultimately a lose / lose game. It will cause people to remove the widgets (reducing your distribution) and these aren't qualified leads, so why do you want them anyway?

There's a big difference between "use MBL" as you put it and "game MBL" as I put it. Are we really that far apart?

Re: MyBlogLog Reacts to Boycott, Reinstates Shoemoney

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:16:36 -0000

Secure -- it wasn't showing the userID that was the problem, it was that our cookies weren't secure. This was addressed last night.

As far as why we banned him, I posted that multiple times. And just because a crowd of people were chasing Frankenstein with pitchforks doesn't mean he was a monster.

Re: MyBlogLog Reacts to Boycott, Reinstates Shoemoney

Eric Marcoullier — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 01:05:08 -0000

DDN -- nice of you to join the party. I'll tell you what. If Shoe agrees with you that he didn't update the original post within minutes from 3 uIDs to 12 uIDs then I will personally have him reinstated tomorrow and give him a lifetime Pro account.

Re: The Missing Features of MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:35:07 -0000

We've been talking about something like this. Ultimately, I'd love it if we can make it one-click simple for you to join the communities of all the sites in your blogroll (or MyYahoo or FeedReader or...) and then replace your blogroll with a widget that automatically updates as you join new communities.

Besides the resource issue (custom communities and Y! integration are sucking everything up in the short term) there's the whole "how good is good enough" question. Many people organize their blogrolls pretty extensively, so how much of that do we need to support before people will replace their blogroll with a widget? What do you think the basic features need to be?

Re: The Missing Features of MyBlogLog

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:18:51 -0000

Doug -- I like the idea of complementing the widget instead of replacing it. Great idea!

Re: The Most Sickness Ever Avatar Picture

Eric Marcoullier — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:47:08 -0000

Some people have no class.

Re: MyBlogLog Spam Getting Worse? I’d Say So.

Eric Marcoullier — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:15 -0000

Tamar -- When you get a moment, I would appreciate it if you looked at the blog post on MyBlogLog's blog that reviews this whole weekend as well as our plans moving forward. Your feedback would be much appreciated. http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02...

Re: Keyword fun

Eric Marcoullier — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:15:54 -0000

Ah yes, the infamous MyBlogLog sex. Trust me when I say you're not missing anything, no matter how great the avatars look. Can you say "Crying Game"?