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Our out of town MyBlogLog family members have been working double time this week! Not only have Mani and Saurabh hooked you up with the IntenseDebate and Disqus goodness for your lifestream, but just for good measure, they added Pownce, ThisNext wishlists and, If you have already given us your FriendFeed ID, you will start to see your updates from Diigo, TipJoy and Mister Wong as well!
Update your IDs on your services page to get started!
Last week we posted here that MyBlogLog added a place in the Profile to include Disqus and IntenseDebate. Today we've turned on our extractors so that comments you make on either service will make their way into your New with Me lifestream. This will supplement the MyBlogLog comments you leave on MyBlogLog-enabled sites today that are already part of your lifestream if you've "enabled" it on the Services tab in your Profile.
Both services are growing like weeds as they each offer advantages over plain old comment systems that come bundled with your blogging platform.
If you don't have a profile on these services, sign up today and add your profile ID to MyBlogLog. If you run a blog, be sure to check out Intense Debate and Disqus and add either one to your site today.
Todd is running Disqus on toddsampson.com and I'm running Intense Debate on everwas.com so you can see them in action. We'll be adding Intense Debate to the MyBlogLog blog shortly as a favor to Todd's TechStars connection but check out each one and choose your favorite.
OK, so this might just be the pretty much the most rad thing I have ever seen. Using the MyBlogLog API, check out what MBL member KeyJ63 created!
At first glance it looks like our normal run of the mill Recent Reader widget. You got your recent visitors, a link to join the community and all that jazz. But oh? What is this community tab up top? Clicking on that will pop up an entire screen of awesome.
So in the center there you got your blog community, surrounded by the community’s most recent readers. And from each of those readers, you can see the blog communities they are a member of, and follow the paths and you can find the blogs that your readers have in common.
But the hotness doesn’t stop there. Not only can you drag around the readers and blogs around the screen, go ahead and try double clicking on any of the icons. As if by magic the whole thing mixes up and arranges everything to focus on the selected reader or blog. And if that is not enough, select a reader and up springs a site bio, or select blog and a little window appears and shows you the Alexa page rank and traffic stats. I don’t know about you, but I am definitely super impressed!
Kudos! You totally rock!
Hey everyone! We just added fields for you to add your Disqus and Intense Debate IDs to your profile's Services tab. We're just collecting names for now which will add the icon & pointer on your MyBlogLog profile page, email signature and About Me widgets. We are building support to include your comments into your New with Me page in the near future.
Stay tuned.
Every blogger knows that most of their traffic comes via referrals. Whether it's from a search engine, link from another blog, or via a tinyurl embedded in someone's tweet - readers flow across your site dropping by to graze on something that caught their eye then are off again just as quickly as they came.
Various plug-ins are out there to give readers a reason to hang out a bit longer on your site. Some of them present a list of similar posts from your archives, another creates a dynamic list of all-time popular posts so the viewers can browse your greatest hits.
Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.
Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user's profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog's archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.
The plug-in is configurable. You can also weight the recency and tag matching logic to determine the headlines you'd like to show. The idea is to engage readers with related content that's of interest to them. It's an innovation that cannot really be appreciated until you see how it performs for different users. Below are two sets of headlines presented by the Just for You plug-in from my personal blog, everwas by two different users.
Top tags are MyBlogLog and Yahoo!
If the reader is not a MyBlogLog user, Just for You will present a list of headlines using the collective tags of recent MyBlogLog visitors which it uses as a proxy to determine interests of the current reader. Just for You was built by Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni from our Yahoo! Bangalore offices who took the original concept and added much of their own semantic matching pixie dust. A patent has been filed.
Powering Just for You is The MyBlogLog API which is completely open so that developers can build hooks in to take advantage what MyBlogLog users share on their profile. Take a look at what Lijit (adds your blog url on signup page) and Thingfo (pre-filling in registration fields) are doing to personalize the user experience. As Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says in his post about Just for You,
Just For You is a great example of what this API can do. There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free and base recommendations on the self-identified interests of their readers. That's really powerful.
If you're a MyBlogLog user, visit everwas.com and see what comes up in the Just for You box in the sidebar. If you're running a hosted WordPress blog, install the plug-in and let us know with a trackback to this post so we can follow it over to your blog and leave comments on your post on what comes up for each of us.
