“Getting” MyBlogLog
| Thursday, January 18th, 2007 | --jr |
I admit it, I didn't really get why MyBlogLog was such a big deal. Yeah, sure, there's that cute visitng list and a few other things, but seriously, what was the huge buzz about it?
Well, silly me for not actually checking it out.
Turns out there's several things that make this pretty darn cool, none of them have really anything to do with the stuff you normally see.
The first thing to note is that this is about gathering statistics, specifically, not just statistics you get from your page, but statistics from your visitors. It notes the pages they come to, where they've come from and where they're off to. It does this by setting a cookie on anyone that's ever visited any page with MyBlogLog.
Ok, that sounds pretty creepy from a privacy angle, doesn't it? Well, it's not like this is something new, and for that matter, it's not like it's something that you can't fix by simply blocking cookies from MyBlogLog.com, which nearly every browser supports. Got a browser that doesn't? Time to change browsers.
"But wait!", I hear you say, "Couldn't I get that by analyzing my logs and adding a bit of javascript to determine which link someone heads off on?" Well, yeah, you could. This is just saving you the hassle of doing that. Plus, you get some additional aggregation information from the greater unwashed.
Of course, this wouldn't be a web2.0 offering without some form of social interaction, so there's the added bonus of providing lots of information about what folks are doing related to you. You can set up (or people can join) your communities. From those communities, you can discover things of interest to your audience. (See? It's not just prying on unsuspecting people. It's prying on completely suspecting people who are willing to give you that info to begin with.)
Of course, that community page also let's folks comment to you (not really sure I get that, since blogs kinda, you know, allow that, but some other pages don't), popular links and other bits.
So, is it cool? Yeah, it kinda is. To be honest though, the real win here is the tracking for the site owner. It's invisible (so there's no redirecters or weird inline values (like http://example.com/#ylt=8675309wtfbbq12afquack). That's insanely useful, and fairly well proven. I'd use it.