A beginner's guide to MyBlogLog

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Honestly, it's a bit difficult to explain the purpose of MyBlogLog (hereafter abbreviated to MBL for speed) without saying "it's a blogging network".  It's easier to look at the different features you get when you sign up.

The Readers grid

When you sign up at MBL, you are given some code that has to be added to your site to keep track of the visitors.  You can also add a readers grid if you wish.  Whenever a member of MBL visits your site, their picture will be displayed in the grid of readers.

This grid is quite a nice feature - not everyone comments, so it's good to see who's stopping by.  I only show 9 readers in my grid - you can show more, which is handy if you get a lot of visitors - but personally, I don't like seeing a huge grid of images on a site.  How exactly does it benefit readers to have so many images in the sidebar?  Also, I have noticed that the grid can sometimes be slow to load.

Communities

You'll notice on the reader grid that there's a link to "view" or "join" the community.  Each site on MBL has its own community, which shows latest content from the site, a list of community members, and the newest members.



There are a couple of screens for community owners to play with - I'll get to those in a moment.  But for community members, there's basically nothing to do in a community.  While I know I'd prefer people to comment directly on my site than comment in a community on MBL, at least if that was an option, it might encourage some discussions at MBL.  Right now, I see no way to discuss anything directly on the MBL site.

You can send a message to all members of a community, but honestly, this just seems like spam to me.

Most things in a community are just not interesting enough to keep members coming back to MBL.  Latest content can be seen by going to the site or by using a feed reader.  When a community has a lot of members, nobody's going to look through the list to see who's there - it's just too many people.

So I'm not particularly thrilled with MBL communities, at least from the member's perspective.

Statistics

This is something I do like about MBL.  When you join MBL, you get to try out the Pro features for free.  The enhanced stats are good, but honestly, I wouldn't pay for them.  The regular stats are still worth looking at as they provide a quick way to see your daily stats.  You can see where readers came from, what they viewed, and which outgoing links they clicked.



It's great to see daily stats.  I usually look at how many visitors I've had each month, and some of stats get lost by the end of the month - such as a site that might have linked to me but only generated a couple of clicks.  I'm not a huge fan of Google Analytics (an online tool that provides detailed statistics for your site) so the MBL stats are pretty good for me.

Most interestingly, I've noticed a lot of clicks on Google AdSense (an advertising program where you get money for every click) - far more than have actually shown up in AdSense itself.  This is a topic for another day, but I've seen a lot of bloggers saying the same thing.  Because of the discrepancies, I removed AdSense from my site a couple of days ago.

Contacts

Everyone on MBL has a profile with links to their sites and some information about who they are.  You can see who's visited your profile recently and you can post messages on profiles.  You can also add people to your contacts.

As with most of MBL, this seems like another half-hearted feature that doesn't really serve a purpose.  Every day or two I get an email saying someone added me, and I usually add them back.  For what?  Maybe a quick visit to my site, but there are people who have thousands of contacts and just want everyone to visit their site - they don't really look at yours.

I just don't see the point in adding contacts at MBL.

Hot and New Content

There are a couple of other pages on MBL that provide information about some of the "hot" communities and members, and the newest registrations.

On one page, we have: six hot communities, two new communities, and a grid of the top 50 communities:



And on another page, we have: six hot members, six new members, one "meet the member" slot, and six of the newest members in communities across the site:



Seems to me that MBL is just tinkering with ways to display some of their members and communities.  Members cannot personalise these pages to only display communities or members with certain tags, categories, from a certain location, or any of a wide range of possible variables.

I'm guessing there are a lot more than 6 members and 6 communities on MBL.  The Top 50 Communities must miss out thousands of other communities.  It seems like we can find some of the newest entries and some of the biggest sites - but how do we find everyone else?  Why is it so hard to find the sites in the middle?

Verdict

I don't think that MBL is a bad site, but it seems like it's lacking a lot of features and hasn't really changed in a long time.  Other sites have come along like Entrecard and BlogCatalog that do many things far better than MBL, and MBL doesn't seem to try and catch up.

As with so many other blogging networks, we always see the same big names at the top with very little hope of finding any of the "small to medium sized" sites.  At least Entrecard is doing some good things in this area now.  In comparison, MBL not only looks dated, it fails to captivate my attention for any reason other than the statistics - and they're not even the main focus of the site.

I have seen a lot of people recommending MBL because it's what they use and what they know.  But there is so little to do on MBL and so little point in even being a member.

I guess people don't like change, so they are hanging onto MBL because everyone else is doing the same.  I think the time has come for people to remove the MBL widget from their sites and start using sites that actually allow them to interact with other members.  Maybe then MBL will wake up and start doing something to catch up the competition.

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