For me?
| Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | --Sean |
MyBlogLog has done a lot of awesome things with fostering blog communities, but the most visible feature, tracking the users who have visited a page, has always puzzled me a bit. Do I, as a blog reader, really want to carry around all of these identifying cookies just so I can get my icon added to the list of recent viewers? It's interesting for other readers and the blog owner, certainly, but maybe I'm not that selfless about giving to the community.
The new Just For You widget speaks to my more selfish motivations. Now I have a reason to broadcast to the blogosphere who I am -- they can use that information to help find other stories on that site that I might be interested in (based on my stated interests through MyBlogLog) and explicitly call those to my attention in a pretty little module. It's a tiny bit invasive, I suppose, but it's also useful, which offsets a lot of those sticky privacy issues. As long as you're going around and being a good netizen, you might as well get something out of it.