This social media service will be a boon to publishers

As announced this morning, MyBlogLog has officially joined the Yahoo! family.  As an early user and proponent, I’m personally very excited about this, but more importantly I’m here to report that it’s another terrific tool we can offer to help publishers analyze, understand, and maybe even increase their traffic.

MyBlogLog’s signature Reader Roll’s functionality is easy to grasp, but its implications to publishers are powerful: This distributed community widget turns passive readers into mini-publishers and connects publishers to each other via readers-in-common. In this way, the Reader Roll deepens the publisher/reader relationship—and transforms the entire web into a distributed social network.

Is that all, you ask? Nope, there’s more! MyBlogLog also offers full-fledged publisher analytics, which combine with its community features to create a unique and powerful way for publishers (be they large media companies, serious webmasters, or hobbyists) to learn about their readers. We’re not just talking about page-view counts and referral URLs here, but names, faces and personalities, too.

How it works is very simple. Check out this Reader Roll mock-up (or the live one in the right-hand column):

It’s the last five readers of this blog who are already registered with MyBlogLog. You’ll find similar lists on YPN friends Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, and AVC, along with thousands of other sites, blogs, and personal pages across the web.

If you click on the user photos, you’ll see a profile page that includes any websites the users claim as publishers (each of which has its own MyBlogLog page), join their contact networks or the community networks for any of their sites, leave them a message, and see what links are “hot” among their readership. You can also see any sites for which they’ve joined the reader community, information that the users have elected to share (such as their Yahoo! IM handles, Flickr usernames, and the like).

Once you sign up as a publisher, you get access to all the same kinds of information about your readers, plus detailed “eyes-only” web analytics stats in a really easy-to-use format. You can even expose some of that information to your readers, if you like. Note also that there’s a leverage effect to the network, because your readers, by interacting with each other, deepen their affinity as your audience—and because you can get information and insight not only on your readers’ activities on your site, but, in aggregate, off your site as well (for example, articles popular among your readers). You may even find that you get new traffic from visitors of other sites that you read or are similar to yours—my MyBlogLog community page has been among the largest sources of traffic to my own blog since I joined. 

Thus MyBlogLog helps us offer another set of innovative social media tools to publishers. Over the longer term, the terrific team that built it will continue to expand upon the explosion of publisher-enabling technologies that can help you drive revenue, grow traffic, and build cool experiences… but we’ll leave the details up to speculation for now .

In the meantime, congratulations to Eric, Todd, Scott, and the rest of the talented MyBlogLog team.  Please welcome them to the Yahoo! publisher community and give their services a whirl!

—Greg Cohn Senior Manager, Market Segments