Tag Archives ⇒ MyBlogLog

Web 2.0 – MyBlogLog

· Brandon Hann

This one is mainly for those running blogs. However, this doesn’t limit you to personal blogs. A lot of businesses are now using blogs to promote and sell products. If you can imagine a Facebook geared specifically for blog sites, then MyBlogLog is what you get.

What is it?

MyBlogLog is now a Yahoo! service after being acquired in 2007 for around $10 million. Blog owners can download a widget to put on their blog that connects other blog owners with each other based on content and keywords. When you create your free account, you are creating a blog community for your listed blog(s). This community is then searchable, shareable and subscribe-able by all users of MyBlogLog. See what I mean by going to my MyBlogLog community–you can join right from this page.

This service is a great tool to continue spreading the word about your site. One thing I really like about sites like this and Technorati is that they are designed for bloggers. Getting listed in Google is great, but your site is thrown in with the masses and is compared to all other web-types out there. When your blog is within a blogging community, you’re undoubtedly going to be better embraced.

Widgets

There are website widgets available to place on your website that extend your site’s functionality for your account. Widgets allow you to display recently viewed pages on your site as well as recent members who visited your blog. This allows you to show your MyBlogLog visitors to your own visitors. All links are based on related content and doing this creates a much deeper network within the community.

Another widget, which is actually a WordPress plugin, called Just for You goes a step further in connecting people based on interests. What’s really cool about this one is that it displays related content on your site based on whether that visitor is a MyBlogLog member or not. If your visitor is a member, they’ll get to see related posts on your site based on the tags they have in their account. If they’re not a member, they will see related posts based on recent member’s tags.

Other widgets allow you to display your current statuses and updates to your blog alongside countless other services and features that you integrate into your MyBlogLog account.

My two cents

The goal for your blog or any website that you’re building is to get it out in the world as much as possible without spamming or doing other “shady” practices. This site allows you to just add one more way to get your content in front of others that are looking for it.

If you’re looking for another similar service that is not part of this series, check out my article on Arkayne. There’s a video that explains it all!

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Web 2.0 – Authority Hubs

· Brandon Hann

Originally, this was just going to be a topic header, but I felt like you should become familiar with the term hubs and authorities first. This terms is also defined as the HITS algorithm. It is generally thought of as a precursor to Google’s PageRank and operates in a similar fashion. By ranking websites based on the amount of links it has throughout the Internet, you generally get a few that float to the top. These sites become authoritative in their subject matter and are considered higher ranking sites because of this.

When making your own website, becoming an authoritative site is not that easy and should not be one of your starting goals. In time, you may get there, but for now, your focus should be on utilizing existing authority websites. The ones I break down on my site are just two of the more popular “hub” sites that specialize in exactly this purpose. However, any website with a high authority score can add huge benefits to your site. An example would be WikiPedia.

Wikipedia is considered a HIGHLY authoritative site given the vast amount of information it contains. If you were to provide a website or blog that contributes important information, you might be able to score a link from a Wiki article. Even though WikiPedia uses the rel-nofollow tag, it would still provide a substantial increase in traffic for a trending topic.

Getting links

I wrote a detailed article about the various types of links and how to get them for your site, so I won’t go into it here, but I did want to to mention a couple of things. Getting backlinks to your site is very important. Hub authorities are great for this because they allow you to interact with users that share common interests while also providing them with information that they can subscribe to.

Generally speaking, you want to maximize your coverage for your website. There are tons of services out there that allow you to share all sorts of information. Obviously, not everybody uses the same services, so you want to spread your site across as many as you can handle to ensure that everyone can search for and find your information. More traffic=more income.

Services

Authority hubs are similar to social bookmarking sites, but since I have a separate section planned for that, I don’t want to confuse the two. Take a look at the next two pages to see the two service sites I use for my site.

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