introduced a new interactive widget New MyblogLog Widget With the recently introduced API still in closed beta, I can only imaging they are going to add a little more to the information panel in the future to expose your activities in the "social cloud"."/>

New MyBlogLog Community Widget

By Andy Beard | Published: February 14, 2008

MyBlogLog have introduced a new interactive widget

New MyblogLog Widget

With the recently introduced API still in closed beta, I can only imagine they are going to add a little more to the information panel in the future to expose your activities in the “social cloud”.

They have limited the widget to 7 colours, no MyBlogLog green, but you can go for Yahoo purple – I would have liked a white with black borders, but have opted for black.

The description shown is very short, so you might want to optimize your description on MyBlogLog to have a very powerful first line.

In addition only 5 of your registered blogs are show, and currently there is no way within MyBlogLog to change the order your blogs are displayed, so in my case I can’t promote my involvement at Collective Thoughts.

Apparently they will also offer the possibility to skin the widgets in the future, so that will solve the colour co-ordination problems.

Update

Kent Brewster’s new Blog Juice widget is very cool as well. You can actually browse from one community to another with it without opening a new page.

Blog Juice Using MyblogLog API

Share
This entry was posted in web 2.0 and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink . Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

11 Comments

  1. whydowork (10 comments.)
    Posted February 14, 2008 at 5:07 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the update. I like the MyBlogLog widget and its the only one I run on my blog. ’07 was a year where the blog widget really took off, and surprisingly MyBlogLog seems to do the most for me in terms of driving traffic.

    I’m somewhat surprised you have the BlogRush widget up, whats the driver for that?

    • Andy Beard (1944 comments.)
      Posted February 14, 2008 at 5:23 am | Permalink

      I haven’t seen a valid reason to remove it.

      John Reese implemented better targeting, though it did take a bit longer, and if you are inclined you can also use a plugin to ensure a specific post is displayed from a dedicated RSS feed.

      The primary reason now that it doesn’t send a reasonable amount of traffic is that so many people have “talked it down” having previously reported inaccurate statistics and misunderstood the concept.

      I have 2000 people in my MBL community, but I generally get as much traffic from Blogrush every day as I get from MBL and that is passive, without optimization.

      I am sure if I was more active on MBL I could get more traffic, in the same way if I optimized Blogrush I would get more.

      Blogrush is great for small niche blogs, they actually get some useful free traffic. Not a lot, but it is useful.

  2. Melody (2 comments.)
    Posted February 14, 2008 at 5:58 am | Permalink

    Thanks for letting me know about MyBlogLogs new widget I like the interactive features much better than the old ones.

  3. Rob (1 comments.)
    Posted February 14, 2008 at 11:58 am | Permalink

    I tried Blogrush for a while and I found it pretty useless for my needs. The content wasn’t targeted enough.

    I didn’t notice any significant traffic via the network. However, I’m going to give MyBlogLog a try with this new widget.

  4. Chris Goffinet
    Posted February 14, 2008 at 3:55 pm | Permalink

    Skinning is possible today. I have already made a ‘deep blue’ skin. If you look at the CSS property .mbl_widget_background in the code, you can already do this. http://www.chrisgoffinet.com

  5. NotebookRepublic (1 comments.)
    Posted February 14, 2008 at 5:32 pm | Permalink

    I’ve been waiting all along for this kind of widget, I’m joining now … thanks for sharing!

  6. Justin Smith (2 comments.)
    Posted February 15, 2008 at 5:13 am | Permalink

    I’m so happy to finally see some much needed changes to the myblog widget.

    Even though mybloglog has stuck as the “visual visitor” widget of choice, it really needed some updating.

    Thanks for sharing, it was the first I’d seen of it.

  7. Brown Baron (5 comments.)
    Posted February 15, 2008 at 9:06 am | Permalink

    I’ve used Kent’s Blog Juice widget and it was pretty good. That new look for the MBL widget looks much better than the default. I wonder if they have a brown-colored one.

  8. bittersweetcollide (1 comments.)
    Posted February 15, 2008 at 9:21 am | Permalink

    Thanks for sharing, I just went ahead and got my new widget for my blog. :)

  9. Kyle (1 comments.)
    Posted February 16, 2008 at 11:09 pm | Permalink

    I just noticed the new MyBlogLog widget earlier today! Between that and Yahoo’s full integration with the service it looks like MyBlogLog is making some big gains real quick. Its a little tricky to classify the service, but I guess it best competes with Technorati and all this is another step to build them up as an authority where Technorati has been falling lately with all the spam in that system.

  10. Gary (1 comments.)
    Posted February 19, 2008 at 12:51 pm | Permalink

    While I keep a minimal MyBlogLog widget on my site, I’ve given up actually being part of the community. There seems little point in it. BlogCagtalog is much better at doing the same thing. Entrecard is better at driving traffic.

2 Trackbacks

  1. By Updating MyBlogLog widget not working at WebGrrrl.net, Home of Lorna Timbah On-line on February 14, 2008 at 5:57 pm

    [...] I read Andy Beard’s feed update on the latest MyBlogLog widget and seeing how cool-looking it was, I immediately rushed to my MBL dashboard and generated the [...]

  2. By Bloggers Digest 2/15/08 - Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog on February 18, 2008 at 5:14 am

    [...] Beard blogged about an exciting update to the MyBlogLog widget (see the pretty faces in the right hand column of this blog?). Still in Beta, the new MBL widget [...]