The Low down on MyLogBlog - 8.11.07

The Low down on MyLogBlog - Entry for 08 November 2007

After 360, the name MyLogBlog is a bit staid and unimaginative and abbreviated it's even worse. MLB has the look about it of a medical insurer, but the important question in the minds of a lot of people is, will my friends join me there?

The funny thing about this site is if you join MLB and your online friends don't, it won't necessarily stop you mixing with them.

The MLB profile I see as a kind of portal. MyLogBlog is not a blog. But it is a community of bloggers.

You go into your MLB profile and, depending on how you set it up, stored in there can be links to all of your blogs, your Youtube account, your Meem account, your Photobucket account, your Digg account, your Delicious account, and so on.

And with the vaunted changes coming up for 360 bloggers many of us joined Multiply and/or Mash in an attempt to stay together with our 360 friends. There again some of us have spread ourselves even thinner throughout the blogosphere by joining a number of other blogs for the fact of seeing what will make the best alternative when 360 disappears next year. And one thing we might be glad of is that we have been given plenty of advance warning not only that Yahoo is going to "scuttle" 360 but roughly when - it's thought some time through the first quarter of 2008.

To my point, though, given the fact that we might have a range of blogs, the rather useful feature about MLB is that - rather than loading down your browser with a heap of tabs (albeit that your browser is Flock) - or logging in and out of the different blogs - you can have all the blogs that you have authored at your fingertips, in the one place, accessible via links on your MyLogBlog profile.

So (at least in the first instance) you log onto only one membership in which you can view your other memberships.

It's in fact a simple but effective solution to the complexity of our having memberships to all manner of sites spread all over the web, and I know my situation is out of control.

Further, in normal Yahoo tradition, there are communities either set up or building which you can join to vary your blogging experience even wider than you currently do. I don't know why you would want to but you can join up to 15 communities a day - that's voluntarily joining, while if your settings permit auto-join, those you join by default of auto-join, don't count towards the limit.

In answer to your question before you ask it, when you visit a community a number of times, if your settings allow for it you become a member of that community automatically. If the idea doesn't appeal, turn off the auto-join setting.

There is no compulsory fee of $25/year (that's per blog incidentally) but you can maintain a free version of the site.

The difference? Okay so there might be more to this than I've been able to pick up in a couple of short hours looking at this but, what Yahoo themselves have to say is this:

The benefits of BlogLog Pro - "Real time stats. If you don't have a lot of traffic, the free version may be sufficient. ... Simply the pro version gives you more robust stats."

Pro also allows for a longer list of top links while with the free version, the top links showing are limited to 10.

I'm not coming down on MLB. I see it has potential to offer a unique service to me and maybe many other bloggers.