{"id":744,"date":"2007-01-18T13:47:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-18T13:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2007-01-18T13:47:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-18T13:47:00","slug":"new-blog-toy-mybloglog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2007\/01\/18\/new-blog-toy-mybloglog\/","title":{"rendered":"New blog toy: MyBlogLog"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve signed up for MyBlogLog<\/a>. If you haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been there, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s part stats and referrals, part blog widgets, and part online community. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been spending an inordinate amount of time over there lately. (As if I weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t already piddling away enough of my time playing with the sitemeter, let alone bloglines, not to mention the blogosphere as a whole.) <\/p>\n

So far, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m intrigued. I like the stats page, with information about where people have come from, what they read and what they click on while they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re here. I even installed a little widget that keeps track of the most popular out-clicks every day and gives a little pop-up window when you hover over a link, showing how many people have clicked that link today. (Try hovering over the comment link from yesterday and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see what I mean. The top 5 outclicks box is waaaaaay down on the sidebar, near the bottom.)<\/p>\n

But there are a couple of things I am less sure about. Another widget you can get shows an avatar (photo you upload) and the name of the most recent visitors to your blog. So, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve signed up for MyBlog Log, and the blog you are reading is also registered, even if you are only quietly lurking, your avatar and name appears in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153recent visitors to this blog\u00e2\u20ac\u009d widget. <\/p>\n

That, for reasons I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t entirely understand, freaks me out a bit.<\/p>\n

I have always liked the anonymity of blog surfing. You can peek in, take a look around, and leave without saying a peep. Yes, your IP address leaves an electronic signature for those who are tech savvy or simply persistent enough to know how to trace it, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a long way from an obscure character set representing my internet service provider to my name and photo right there under the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcrecent visitors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 column.<\/p>\n

(I still haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t figured out whether you can turn off the recognition thing, or whether you have to be logged in for it to work, or whether it follows multiple IP addresses. One of the reasons I actually signed up for MyBlogLog is because they are sadly lacking in useful FAQs and so I signed up out of curiosity to see if I could figure it out as I went along.) <\/p>\n

And then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the whole community aspect. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wondering if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be any better at this one than I am with any of the other social media sites. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got my Flickr account, and a Linked-In account<\/a>, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still terrible about the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfriends and contacts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 part of it. (This would probably be why I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll never have a MySpace or Facebook account!) If I know you and you ask me to make you a contact, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll happily do so, but I never actively seek out contacts. <\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m shy about approaching people. MyBlogLog makes it as easy as a single click to join a blog\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccommunity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122(you don’t need to have the community owner’s approval), and when you do your avatar and name are shown on that blog\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s community page (here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mine<\/a>). I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t too sure about that whole aspect \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I was more than content to grab the outgoing-click widget and play in happy solitude on my stats page when one blogger I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never encountered before joined my community, and my courage to be social was bolstered. I even ventured out and joined a few communities of my own, mostly because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had personal contact with the blogger. But my barely-repressed inner 14 year old worries that maybe these fairly popular bloggers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want awkward me attaching themselves to their blog. (Terrible the scars that high school leaves on you, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it?) <\/p>\n

What do you think? I’ve temporarily installed the ‘recent visitors’ widget so you could see what I’m talking about, but I don’t think I like it. Do you also find it vaguely unsettling to be \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcouted\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 every time you drop by for a visit? And of course, if you have an account or you sign up for one, let me know while I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still in a social phase and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be happy to join your community! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve signed up for MyBlogLog. If you haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been there, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s part stats and referrals, part blog widgets, and part online community. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been spending an inordinate amount of time over there lately. (As if I weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t already piddling away enough of my time playing with the sitemeter, let alone bloglines, not to mention the … Continue reading “New blog toy: MyBlogLog”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}