Lee Odden interviewed MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer and got some insights into the blossoming social community site. From the looks of things, there are certainly some interesting developments in store for the young blogging community site.
To date MyBlogLog clocks in at about 50,000 users, fairly impressive considering the fact that it launched in Mar 2005. And with the recent acquisition by Yahoo! it looks set to grow from strength-to-strength (Especially with a 2% daily growth rate).
From my personal observation, MyBlogLog users tend to be fairly active, especially since the service combines the best features of blogging and social community sites.
As Scott observes, the MyBlogLog widget (typically displayed in the right sidebar of most blogs) certainly proved to be its secret weapon.With blogs already being very social-oriented, the widget only helped accelerate the pace of the service’s “virality”.
It’ll be interesting to see where MyBlogLog fits into Yahoo! strategy.
Niching themselves in the blog community space certainly makes sense for MyBlogLog, especially against a behemoth like Google.
Though Google owns Blogger and runs it’s Blog Search service, it doesn’t have a strong suite of blogging-specific analytics or value-added suite yet.
Here’s where Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live search services can stake out and lay their stakes on new areas.
With Google already claiming mindshare for text and graphic-related search, the other search engines can focus on other areas like Yahoo! Podcasts and Microsoft’s Miss Dewey search engine.
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I thought MyBlogLog started in Mar 2006…I could be wrong though.
Thanks for the great blog!
Derek
yeah, you are right mybloglog is growing very rapidly and is a very important social networking tool nowadays, hope yahoo makes few more acquisitions like mybloglog
I think MyBlogLog has really been a key to the growth of my blog. I really think it does help create community.
It would be nice if joining a community did a bit more than just list an avatar of sites in the community page though.
Derek:
Here’s the word from MBL Community Manager Robyn Tippins:
“05 is correct. The widget was released in June of 06, and we saw phenom growth, so many think that’s when the whole thing was released.”