Laurie, thank you for letting me know how you found the site. The D-list is indeed growing and being used by many people.

Do you have to change the blogspot template a lot? Blogspot should allow people to turn off the no follow tag in the admin pane or something. It is nice that you are going through the templates to help others through this.

Melissa, good point. MyBlogLog definitely needs work on that too, and Robyn has already started doing a good job on it. The service does need to change the mentality, and it seems MyBlogLog is analyzing things to see what needs improving and how.

Vivien-inspiration, thanks for sharing that, Vivien. So if the widget was customizable and fast loading [no issues due to external servers dependency], you would use it. Also, you mentioned the community; so right now, the community concept they have is not interesting to you, I see. Thanks again for clarifying.

Robyn Tippins, thanks for explaining that, I really appreciate it. If MyBlogLog needs help or consultation, I am currently available.

If anyone else has any questions or concerns regarding MyBlogLog or something related, please go ahead and ask.

I recently took over this department and have been answering emails usually within a few minutes. I don’t work evenings or weekends, so sometimes the times there are a little longer, but I try my best to get to emails quickly.

Also, we are working on getting more help on customer service, and, you’ll be thrilled to know that we are working on an updated FAQ. I just wanted to let you know that I’m reading your mind.

I found your site through the D-List, which I stumbled upon on another blog when I was blog-hopping. (I like reading about what others are interested it, looking at how they think, etc.)

I got so excited about the D-List that I stayed up half the night upgrading my template and getting rid of that no follow tag. The blogosphere, the whole internet, should be user-driven and not controlled by the big guys.

Many people use stats programs like sitemeter or even Awstats to find out who visited them, including referring URL. How did you find out about this site, if I may ask?

You have a point. Your site seems to have critical and time-sensitive information, so every part of the page matters. I also like visiting the sites of people who comment on my site, though sometimes it may take a week or so before I can get back to everyone.

Thanks again for the comment. By the way, you have a very interesting site.

I do visit the blogs of people who comment on mine. I guess I just don’t want to be loaded up with “stuff” in the sidebars (but I am loaded up anyway )

Robyn, I will go ahead and reply to each of your answers as well.

1 : True. I have a few suggestions on how to get over the issue of anonymous users not being able to be tracked, easily. I will share that with you or Eric soon.

2 : You’re right; what people do is easy. I myself click colorful icons to find out who the icon owner is. However, as time passes, it seems more and more people are visiting others only when they see others in their MyBlogLog roll. Sure, this is not something that MyBlogLog is trying to promote, but having some things in the FAQ or even community posts or bulletins [we probably need them] can help people learn more on what the service is for and how the service can be abused, and thus, avoided.

Also, by the way, this point # 2 is thinking for the long term goal, where the ethical mentality of judging people based on whether or not they visit a site and whether or not they are also MyBlogLog members can hurt the blogging community as a whole. The users themselves need to be aware of such a trend also, as it is not solely, or even mainly, MyBlogLog’s responsibility. If more and more people start using MyBlogLog to judge who to visit, more frustrated bloggers will start avoiding the service all together as they will feel forced to use the service if they want more visitors.

3 : Good point. I have seen improvements. However, the periodic slowdowns still remain, and I am not sure why. For example, today around 1:50 pm [PST] or so, my site was loading slow or not loading completely because of some image waiting to be downloaded from the MyBlogLog/Yahoo servers. If things are still being migrated, great. However, if things have already been migrated, then I am hoping these slowdowns are random or due to some other factor, and that they will soon go away.

4 : That is indeed good news. I am looking forward to see what your team has in store. I have a few suggestions also that I will try to share with you soon.

5 : I think spam even annoys those spammers, though they still keep on spamming. I am glad to know that you are working on different things to work on this issue. Also, the concept of communities itself needs a lot of work. I will let you know more details about that soon also.

Thanks Robyn for coming and explaining things. I really appreciate it. This should help others a lot who come across this post. Thank you also letting the MyBlogLog team know about this. I will be in touch with you, Eric and the MyBlogLog team more about this and other things soon.

I’ll answer your suggestions by number

1-We track all your visitors, but can only show the avatars of the people who have joined the service. The stats for your site will show as ___ Readers (MBL members) and ___ visitors (all visitors). Unfortunately we can’t show you the virtual identity of anyone who hasn’t told us they want us too. If we did, people would probably call us a little too ‘big brother’.

2-I think people do what is easy. I know I do. And clicking the faces of the people who have visited your site is easy. I like your ending suggestion though. Makes sense.

3-We have been on Yahoo! servers for a few months now and we haven’t seen many problems since this move. MyBlogLog grew so fast initially that server loads were an issue, but since we are on these new servers, it’s been smoother sailing.

4-We are in the process of redesigning the widget right now. I’ll make sure the team hears this suggestion. It does make sense to have the name of the service there, so other users who want a widget can go and make their own, but maybe there is a less obtrusive way to do that.

5-The spam annoys us too. Right now we are having to take our engineers off of cool projects to deal with spam and that stinks. There are several different tests we are doing to make the communities more ‘user-moderated’, I can’t go into them in detail, but please know that we are not going to sit back and let spammers take over here. Communities are our big thing, and if they aren’t giving our users a value then a core priority is being overlooked.

I just wanted you to know that we are listening and posts like this get our attention. I appreciate your thoughtful suggestions and I will make sure the team sees this post.

Even though the service is faster now [the home page seems to be loading faster, though it may be Yahoo servers or my new internet service], even today in the middle of the day my site simply stopped loading for about a minute because of fetching some code and images from the MyBlogLog-Yahoo servers.

The community aspect does need a renovation. More on this soon. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. I will post something on this soon also.