kid's allright

One truly great thing about real friends in the real world is that they inject a joyful happenstance of anywhereness into your daily life.  A random phone call to say hi.  An unexpected email asking you to meet up for coffee.  An IM with a funny link.  Even a surprise running-into at the grocery store.  In the real world, you don’t contact your friends in one set location or way…you could potentially interact with them anywhere.  MyBlogLog brings this "joyful happenstance" or "anywhereness" equivalent to our online lives. 

Just as last.fm is revolutionizing how we listen to music by enabling us to externalize our listening habits, MyBlogLog is externalizing our reading habits by allowing us to lay some claim to sites as we frequent them.  Sort of a like a dog marking its territory or a street artist throwing up a sticker, when I have MyBlogLog turned on, I get to stamp my face (or Rivers Cuomo’s face in the case of my personal avatar) across each site that I encounter. 

To take the street artist metaphor further (for your benefit, I’ll forsake the doggy calling card metaphor), each time a street artist throws up a sticker or tags a wall, her notoriety (and brand) increases.  It’s the definition of guerrilla marketing and self-promotion.  Well, MyBlogLog enables that for online publishers.  Each time I read an article by other MyBlogLog users like Chad, Bradley, Scott, Eric, Matt, Jeremy, Marc, Susan, Yahoo!, Michael, or Richard, my "notrivers" avatar appears on the page instantly…and when people click on it they can make their way to my MyBlogLog profile page and eventually to my site.  And traffic is to a publisher what notoriety is to a street artist. 

MyBlogLog also appeals to the media junkie that lives inside most of us online publishers.  For example, once someone comes to my site via my avatar, they end up leaving their calling card on my site.  I can see that they’ve been there.  If it is someone influential, I might get all giddy and bubbly from personal pride ("wow, I attracted THAT person to my site?").  If it is a friend, I might be reminded to see what they’ve been publishing lately.  If I don’t recognize the latest smiling face in my sidebar, I might click on it to check them out and in the process end up discovering a great new source of content to follow.

Since I’ve been making lists, lists, lists for the last week or so, I’ll list my Top 5 Reasons Why I Love MyBlogLog and am Thrilled to See Them Join Yahoo!:

1. They are, first and foremost, a publishing tool.  And they have quite a twofer: they get ya traffic and help you analyze it too.
2. They are 100% distribution minded.  No bones about it, they are a service specifically designed to be portable.  They live and die by the way people integrate MyBlogLog services into their own sites.  It’s the growth of the service out on the open web that really matters.
3. They help me discover stuff too.  Not only do they drive traffic to my site and fulfill my publisher-minded dependency on traffic and stats, they fulfill my other primordial media need — the need to consume.  Lots of bad powerpoint presentations have pontificated the rise of the "pro-sumer" or the "virtuous circle" of consumer-publishers — I know I’ve created many of them — but MyBlogLog creates a tangible use case for this trend.  As I noted above, I love to use MyBlogLog to see who has been on my site and to go check out their sites, too.
4. They make me feel really cool when someone well known has stopped by.  As a publisher who is, shall we say, less than an "A"-lister, I love to see when a truly big name publisher has somehow stumbled onto my site.  Before MyBlogLog exploded onto the scene, I wouldn’t know if someone big-time came by unless they left a comment or linked back to me (like that’s going to happen).
5. They aren’t just for bloggers.  Name be d@mned, they also work on MySpace and most other sites that allow you to embed content.  This means that anyone looking to build an identity or gauge their "coolness" on MySpace (here’s mine) or other sites have a really powerful arrow in their quiver: they can see who’s reading their page.  We have a fun "product marketing" challenge ahead of ourselves here in terms of introducing this notion to this other (very massive) crowd, but the platform has done a pretty good job of marketing itself so far…

BONUS: The team is really great!  I’ve gotten the chance to meet various members of the team over the past few months and I’m thrilled to welcome them to Yahoo!  Congratulations guys!  And congrats to the teams at Yahoo! that made this happen.  MyBlogLog is such a fun and sticky service that I have to say it: Yahoo! and MyBlogLog is now peanut butter and jelly!

P.S., Sticker art photo by me.  Make sure you check it out on Flickr directly.  Lots of cool notes and comments on it.