Online Media Cultist

Last week, Mapping the Web alerted me to BlogRush, a neat little service that lets bloggers promote their wares on sites similar to theirs. The “viral effect” comes in that the more page views your site gets (promoting five headlines from similar sites each time in a BlogRush widget), the more times your site’s stories are promoted on BlogRush widgets across the interwebs.

In just several weeks of existence, BlogRush has already cracked the top 1,000 on Alexa. While Alexa isn’t a perfect judge of a site’s popularity, there’s no doubt that BlogRush is seeing explosive growth.

Like MyBlogLog, BlogRush makes sense in that it’s a tool that provides real value for bloggers. In the case of MyBlogLog, it lets you see the faces of fellow bloggers who have visited your site, fostering a sense of community while allowing for simple social networking on the MBL home site. BlogRush also appeals to the core need for bloggers to promote themselves.

While web rings and banner ad services that serve links to similar sites have been around for years, BlogRush puts it all together in a tight little package, making it really easy to sign-up and feel the benefits of putting a widget on a blog sidebar.

Don’t be surprised to see a BlogRush widget on OMC in the near future!

One of my main criticisms of MyBlogLog – a site that I’m very fond of overall – is that there’s not enough to do on the site itself, particularly in the Communities section.

Well, that’s starting to change as MyBlogLog is leveraging some of its new Yahoo-connections (MBL was purchased by Yahoo earlier this year) in adding tagging of Communities to the site. So now you can tag Online Media Cultist with words like online, media, crazed lunatic, sucks whale’s feet, and so on and people will be able to search and find the site using such terms (if you can’t be creative with tags, when can you be, I say!).

TechCrunch relates that the MBL community can vote tags up or down to increase or decrease its size in a tag cloud display, which is a very novel idea. It’s so novel, in fact, that I’m not sure anyone will care, but it’s very interesting nonetheless!

There’s also excitement about moves to cut down on spam on MBL, a widespread and long running complaint about the site.

I’m looking forward to seeing what other new wrinkles that MBL may have in store.

Over the weekend, it was announced that social networking site for bloggers MyBlogLog will be rebranded (to something Yahoo-ized, perhaps?), redesigned, and rolled out with a new “widget 2.0″ component in the near future.

I actually think that MyBlogLog’s widget – which allows bloggers to see who is visiting their site, click their profile picture to learn more about them, interact with them, and so on – is far and away its best feature. Getting more detailed statistics or rich information about site visitors would be exciting, so I’m intrigued to find out what the “2.0″ will be all about.

As far as the MyBlogLog site itself, the fact that it’s very stripped down and simple at present is something of a double-edged sword: easy-to-use, but not much to do there at present.

Mike Arrington says that with the upcoming changes, infrastructure upgrades to ensure performance (i.e. not dragging down the page load time of a site where the widget is embedded, the surest way of getting people to drop you like a hot rock) must come first. The Social Web notes that spam is another significant challenge to MBL’s future.

While I’ve heard people complain about performance problems and spam (particularly the latter), I have not personally encountered trouble with either.

I’m excited to see what changes lay ahead for MyBlogLog. I was a relatively early adopter and cheerleader for the site turned somewhat concerned skeptic, so I look forward to seeing what wrinkles that this powerful networking and communications tool may offer.

One interesting prospect: maybe MyBlogLog will aspire to become a LinkedIn for bloggers? Picture advancing features for adding, organizing, and keeping in touch with blogging contacts.

There’s lots of chatter and buzzy buzz about widgets these days, so it’s easy to forget that most regular folk have no earthly idea what they are. For our purposes, we’re actually talking about what Wikipedia terms as “web widgets,” defined as “a third party item that can be embedded in a web page.”

Because of the explosion of regular people publishing billions of pages in the form of blogs and other websites, and particularly the crazy growth of social networking profiles (which are really pre-created web pages that get filled in with information and media provided by the user) on sites like MySpace, the widget industry was born.

So widgets are “extra stuff” that get installed (via simple copy-and-pasting of code into a web page template) on web pages. The question I always think about when I see a widget is: who is the widget for? Is it for a public-facing audience i.e. people visiting that web page or MySpace profile, or is it predominantly there to serve information to the person who installed it?

As a web publisher, it’s important to recognize the difference and utilize a website’s limited real estate, as GigaOM alludes to in a piece entitled “Widget Mania run amok?”

Read/WriteWeb runs down a list of widget examples, and notes the new popularity of “widget commerce,” such as Auction Ads, which allows you to dynamically get updates on selected eBay auctions. I’d argue that this is a good example of a useful widget for the person who installs the widget, but very likely would only appear to be clutter to anyone else. Therefore, it’s a great idea to add this kind of widget to a Netvibes or My Yahoo page (i.e. web pages designed for personal consumption only), but not to a blog, with perhaps the rare exception of one that focuses on eBay auctions or e-commerce.

Personally, I think that with widgets, less is more. MyBlogLog is an ideal widget for blogs, I love to argue, because they serve multiple audiences well. The web publisher gets to see who is visiting his or her site, MyBlogLog members get to have their profile picture show up around the web (which fosters networking and connections), and community is promoted among bloggers and readers with similar interests.

And I also run FeedBurner’s widget, which shows how many RSS readers Online Media Cultist has on any particular day, mostly because I’m a stats junkie!

I’ve written a lot about how much I dig “social networking site for bloggers” MyBlogLog, and speculated more recently that it may be losing its buzz.

The best part about MyBlogLog – far and away – is its widget, which allows you to see MyBlogLog members who have visited your site. You get to see their profile picture (or avatar, or whatever little colorful oddity they’ve chosen to represent themselves with) and their MBL username. Clicking on either takes you to their profile page on MBL, where you can read their bio, leave them a private or public message, and see what site or sites they author and visit them.

This core functionality is extraordinarily powerful. As a blogger it gives me tools to see what other bloggers who visit my site are up to, and contact them if I wish.

In terms of the MyBlogLog site itself, there are other features that are available, but I don’t personally find them all that useful. While I’ve praised MBL in the past for their stripped down and simple social networking model, I increasingly wish of late that I could do more with the on-site features that are available.

I’ll drop a caveat in here before I move on with my critique: there’s no doubt that MBL is still undergoing a major revamping because of its acquisition by Yahoo! (and in fact it was just announced that MBL co-founder Scott Rafer is moving on from the company). That said, here’s what I’d like to see happen:

* Friending: Right now, you can add friends, but there’s nothing to be done with them after you add them beyond having a stored collection of profiles. If I could organize them in ways that are of interest to me (sports bloggers, political bloggers, web 2.0 bloggers, that kind of thing) that would be more useful.

* Communities: This feature is about the most useless on MBL right now, but it has the potential to be great. You can add a website (which exist on MBL as a separate kind of “groups” profile) as a community, and again this simply exists as a way to see all the sites you’ve added as communities. You can post messages on the communities page, but that’s about it. Communities pages desperately need to be able to post a recent stories feed at the least, and then move on to adding features that empower its audience.

* RSS: The number one way to add value to MBL, in my view, is to add recent story feeds across the board, on both profile and community pages. Therefore every time I visit a new page on MBL, I can quickly get a sense of what the profile owner is interested in (which of course quickly tells you whether or not you want to invest more time in sticking around). Further, I’d love to be able to access the RSS feed right from the MBL page so that I can add sites that I’m interested in to my RSS reader.

* Direct communication: It’s nice that you can send people private messages, but it would be simply fantastic if MBL allowed you to create custom bulletin or newsletters. For example, there should be something like a “Get the latest news and information about Online Media Cultist, click here!” button on the OMC community page. Then, I could fire out news and notes about all OMC-related doings to the people on this list. Trust me, once people sign up for such a service, these “acquired customers” are extraordinarily valuable to bloggers.

* Add social bookmarking features: Bloggers who sign up for MBL are natural self-promoters. Along with recent story feeds, add the ability to submit and vote for stories on such places as Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Newsvine, or whatever people want.

* Metrics: MBL does provide stats on site traffic, but I don’t find it that useful. Site Meter works best for me because it tracks hourly, daily, and monthly traffic in real time. Perhaps if MBL provided much richer metrics features I would take interest, but this doesn’t seem to tie into the site’s core mission: allowing bloggers to self-promote and networking with one another.

I really do love MyBlogLog. I just wish there was more for me to do once I click over to the site from Online Media Cultist’s MBL widget.

A Daniela Barbosa piece alerted me to the fact that my bank, Wells Fargo, has a nice little blogging operation going. The background design displays pencils and paper clips and calculators floating around. It talks about exploring the “new frontier” of the blogosphere, and has a bunch of Wells Fargo bloggers writing about the general topic of financing college and managing debt.

It’s kind of cute, actually. And the fact that it’s kind of cute is pretty amazing: this is a huge and potentially impersonal and frightening bank making things down right homey for us regular folk. I really like that the bloggers mix some personal stuff in, and aren’t just regurgitating corporate brochures about FAFSA and college loans. This entry, by Staci Schiller, writes about a trip to New York City for the BlogHer Business ‘07 conference, and chit chats about the bright lights and Madison Square Gardens of the big city. The fist comment: “hello, I need a student loan and information” kind of makes the whole thing sort of hilarious and compelling.

The point, if there’s one to be made here, is that all companies – particularly customer-facing ones – would be well served to blog. There’s simply no better way to put a human face (or faces) on a corporate entity. Blogging and the business world are similar in that it’s a grind it out, attract and hold one loyal customer at a time kind of operation. If people can relate to and feel comfortable with and eventually trust an information source that just happens to be associated with a particular business (and there’s the trick: the blogger has to be interesting and compelling and relatively transparent, all while representing something of an online outpost for a business) there’s every chance that they will make a purchase or select a service from that business.

Start-up founders are ideal bloggers because they’re able to share their enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit while guiding readers through the crazy ups and downs of launching a new venture. Eric at the MyBlogLog Blog and Topix CEO Rich Skrenta’s Skrentablog are fun examples.

Don’t get me wrong, I really dig MyBlogLog, the simple and stripped down social networking tool for bloggers with the killer app widget that lets you see and interact with the readers who visit your site.

But I’m wondering if the buzz is wearing off. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the activity level on the site has subsided considerably since the admittedly recent days when blogger-fueled hype was high and the announcement of MBL’s acquisition by Yahoo! was making the rounds.

Certainly for several months it seemed as though there was a lot of activity on the site itself. I received friend requests frequently for example (see my profile here without doing much to earn the honor, and it was easy to tell just by clicking around that many people were discovering and making use of the site’s features. I’m not getting that sense of late. My activity level on the site is about the same, but the number of friend requests and messages has dropped considerably.

Perhaps even more telling is that I haven’t read anything about MyBlogLog in a while (this Technorati chart is a bit inconclusive, I must admit). Could it be that the early adopter crowd has incorporated MBL into ho hum everyday online life and moved on? I’m guilty myself, having caught the Twitter wave and am very much fixating on that particular e-vortex as the latest-greatest thing.

While Alexa rankings must be taken with a grain of salt, it shows that MBL traffic has leveled off. It’s still ahead of Twitter, though it’s close now!

I still appreciate and love MyBlogLog’s best feature: I get to see the faces (or avatars, or artistic representations) of some of the people who stop by my site.

I’d love to see what other people think: what’s the deal with MyBlogLog these days?

In 2006, I think one of the most interesting developments in the online world was the convergence of blogger culture with social networking culture. Sites like Vox proved that social networks could successfully cater to grownups and bloggy-types, while blogs and social news platforms made efforts to beef up user profiles and social networking features such as friending, in-site mail, and media (pics, videos, audio, and text) sharing. One of my favorite social networking sites, MyBlogLog, is a stripped down social network that serves as a powerful networking and profiling tool for bloggers.

This year, I think there’s going to be a lot of action in combining the immersive virtual world of MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) with advanced social networking features. Or, 2D-meets-3D if you like. TechCrunch’s review of Kaneva showcases a good example, “a new social network that extends the concept of MySpace into a virtual world.”

While Second Life has received quite a lot of buzz, a fair criticism is that people don’t have a lot to do there. New MMOs will have a focus, even if it is to extend the hang out/check out bands/check out each other culture that thrives at massively popular social networking hubs such as MySpace. But I think that the online gaming world, more than anything, will incorporate web-based social networking features that support and extend existing game communities.

How cool is it that right now I can look at Dumpster Bust’s MyBlogLog widget and see Mathew Ingram and Tony Hung – two esteemed members of my top ten favorite online media bloggers club – smiling back at me?

MyBlogLog is an outstanding and blessedly simple social networking tool to network with other bloggers, but most of all it’s super cool to be able to see who has been checking out your site from the MBL community.

I just realized that Blogger allows you to add tags to blog posts.

Actually, I must give credit where it’s due and that belongs to my online pal and fellow member of Blogcritics Magazine and The Mondo Project, Mat Brewster. I’ve seen tags appear on blogspot blogs countless times, I’m sure, but absolutely assumed that they were part of some fancy plug-in that was not for the likes of me.

Part of my reintroduction to blogging from my own site on Blogger (as opposed to writing exclusively for BC, which I did for about a year) is that I’ve been able to better tune in to how bloggers are organizing themselves and their information, promoting themselves, and building audience.

This post is a bit of an experiment. Since I started posting here regularly since the first of the year, I’ve noticed that the majority of my traffic comes from the following sources:

* MyBlogLog: A great networking site for bloggers, it also helps to bring in some traffic.

* Techmeme: Great great source for following current tech and online media stories and the conversations springing up around them. I’ve been able to hit this page a nice number of times, and have brought back some visitors because of it.

* Blogcritics Magazine: Cross-publishing at the old battleship BC absolutely has a positive effect on one’s “home site” bottom line.

* Search traffic: mostly Google.com, but drips and drabs from Yahoo!, Ice Rocket (I think mentioning Mark Cuban’s name helps, which is indeed worthy of another experiment!), and Google Blog Search.

Search traffic is that great randomizer. If you can pull lots of it, you can sail off to Tahiti for six months and still have rip roaring traffic stats when you get back. If you don’t, it’s a grind-it-out battle to itch and scratch each reader home for supper.

This is somewhat the topic of a raging debate of the online moment, with entrepreneur and provocateur Jason Calacanis setting off fireworks with talk of SEO (search engine optimization, or rigging one’s code to harness more search engine traffic) being “bullshit” and a swift and immediate blowback from the likes of Neil Patel following, who challenges Jason to allow him to increase his own traffic “by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect” with promises of no shady dealings on route. And it seems Jason has accepted – the great SEO throwdown is on!

In any event, without being shady (I know so little about code that this would be very difficult anyway!) and as openly as I can, I’ve placed a nice number of wide ranging links and references here that hopefully add up to nearly a coherent whole.

I’ve listed the following blog tags as part of this post: blogger, blog, blogs, google, search, SEO, ice rocket, mark cuban, google blog search, techmeme, mybloglog, blogcritics, jason calacanis, neil patel, page rank

So the questions are: did I “optimize” this post by writing a decent piece and linking out to fellow bloggers and engagers in the online conversation? Or will dropping a deluge of tags at the bottom help auto-magically bring home some visitors? Or, perhaps, did none of this pile up to a hill of e-beans in the vast vacuum of the blogospheric realm?

I’ll report back the results, and look forward to your thoughts.