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Personal Blogs

A personal blog can be a place where a blogger talks about his or her daily life, daily outtake on things, or even opinions about certain topics. A personal touch is added where the personal and human emotion and feeling and analysis, among several other things, are given preference over business or non-personal attitudes. I also recently talked about how personal blogs can and should have subniches, something which has not yet been done effectively because many people still think personal blogging is not a niche at all. Spoken-For and BubblesSoc are examples of how personal blogs can compete with non-personal blogs very effectively with interesting, personal designs and useful perspective on things.

Non-Personal Blogs

A non-personal blog can be a place where a blogger does not aim to get personal with the readers. For example, places like Google Analytics Blog, MyBlogLog Blog, and even CopyBlogger are places where the focus of an entity is on a certain topic and promoting an idea to the readers. In this case, Google and MyBlogLog blogs are simply advertisements and news blogs, promoting a certain company and its products and services. CopyBlogger is a great example of a non-personal blog that delivers very useful information to people looking for help with online copy writing.

Are there any other categories?

Yes, and I think you are looking at one of them. A third kind of category is a hybrid of personal blogs, non-personal blogs and a few other things. The personal message, ideas, ideals and values are never let go, and the actual style changes depending on the message at hand. I also like to think that every blog can be a personal blog, if certain elements are present in that blog.

Do you prefer non-personal blogs over personal blogs? How about your own blog, or the blogs you read?

What is your opinion about this? Do you prefer reading or writing non-personal blogs over personal blogs? Would you consider a personal blogger as important as a non-personal blogger?

Thank you for reading.

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Pros:

• Track some people who visit your site
• Get traffic by having other MyBlogLog members visit your site, similar to a traffic exchange network where members visit anyone voluntarily who visits their site
• The MyBlogLog team is trying hard to listen to the readers and improve the service as one of their main priorities, thus you have greater chances of having your suggestions implemented than before
• Be able to see a list of regular MyBlogLog readers who like your website on a regular basis

Cons:

• Track only other MyBlogLog members
• Available only if the widget is displayed
• MyBlogLog code can slow down or halt your site - for an example, see the attached image of how MyBlogLog sometimes halts The Reasoner - opens in a new window. The screenshot image is an example of how the MyBlogLog code keeps waiting for something to load from the Yahoo/MyBlogLog servers, and my website is never completely loaded in such cases.
• MyBlogLog widget is not customizable
• MyBlogLog communities are currently blogrolls being spammed by many members

Do the MyBlogLog Pros outweigh the Cons for you, or vice versa?

So, if you have a blog, do you like using MyBlogLog? If you do not have a blog, or have not used MyBlogLog yet, would you like using MyBlogLog on your site?

Please let me know. Thank you.

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1. Stop learning new things: One of the reasons your blogging skills may be getting outdated can be because of your reluctance to learn new online programming languages, or new ways to do different blog things, like creating new blog themes or creating new kinds of blog content. You may be compensating for such a deficiency by experimenting a lot with what you already know.
2. Have outside factors control your skills: If you allow outside tools to do specific things on your blog, you are depending on those tools. While it is good to use external tools like MyBlogLog or plugins for your site, it is even better to know how such services work in order to come up with your own alternative or replacement if you ever wish to stop using such external tools which are not under your direct control. Otherwise, just because you know how to use an external blogging service does not mean you know how to provide to your own blog, on your own, the same functionality as that external blogging service.
3. Blog about the same thing repeatedly: There is no doubt that you can blog about topics like “Catchy Headlines“, but if you write 20 posts on the same topic even from different perspectives, you should either have a blog that focuses solely on headlines or you should have a plan that incorporates those 20 posts into a larger picture. Otherwise, blogging about the same thing repeatedly may signify that you do not know what to blog about, and are probably not looking into different areas of your life or the offline world in order to come up with fresh topics or different messages to express.
4. Blog about the same things as everyone else: If you are like many news reporting sites or blogs, you probably blog about things that everyone else is blogging about, in almost the same manner too. There is nothing wrong with blogging about something that everyone is also talking about. However, such a behavior from your side shows that your blogging skills are outdated because they depend on the blogging skills of other people. You apparently cannot come up with your own content, and you probably do not even know how to present commonly discussed topics in your own words.
5. Avoid the latest blogging tools: Even though I mentioned in the first point above that knowing how external tools work can be a good idea, you may have noticed that I did not say in that point that using external tools was a bad thing. External tools can be more than good. Use external tools if they allow you to do necessary tasks more efficiently and with better results than otherwise possible. Similarly, trying to do complex things manually, when you can instead use software like WordPress, results in your attention being diverted unnecessarily, and inefficiently, to things that can be done quickly and more efficiently through tools already developed and available for use by others. The more time you focus on different things on your blog, the less time you focus on actually coming up with great ways to convey your thoughts on your blog.

The above 5 are some of the many reasons that can result in your blogging skills to become outdated. You may simply be doing or avoiding one of these things, but along the way, you may be neglecting something more important because of paying attention to something of lesser value. As a result, your blogging skills may not be up to date on many levels. That puts you at a risk of not being taken seriously by employers looking for specific skills, or even your readers who realize that a lot of the things you do are not beneficial in the long term, for both you and your readers.

What is your opinion on this? Is there any point you disagree with, or have an example for? Can you think of other points that signify that you are slowly starting to lose control of your blogging skills and may be falling behind?

Thank you for reading.

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Following are 5 things that I think MyBlogLog, or Yahoo, need to improve or work on in the long run. Just because a business model exists does not mean it will work. It has to be fixed and improved constantly. It is more important to fix current bugs that affect users or the overall service instead of introducing new fancy features.

5 things MyBlogLog needs to improve

1. MyBlogLog only tracks other MyBlogLog users

   MyBlogLog lets you discover people who visit your site only if they are also MyBlogLog users. Otherwise, you get even fewer stats than your regular stats program.

   “MyBlogLog was designed to track only registered MyBlogLog users“, you say? Then why is everyone running around, including MyBlogLog admins, claiming that anyone who visits your site can be tracked? The original promise of the program was to discover who visited your site, and not which MyBlogLog members visit your site.

   This bad point about MyBlogLog is also its strongest selling point: if a user is registered, it allows a site owner to find out exactly who was visiting a site including their name and site url.

2. I visit your site only if I see you on my MyBlogLog widget

   Many bloggers have stopped visiting other sites unless they see someone in their MyBlogLog widget. That means these bloggers are only visiting the sites of those MyBlogLog members who visit them. That also means these bloggers do not visit, or rarely visit, the sites of their commentors or people who are not MyBlogLog users.

   MyBlogLog is supposed to let you find out who visits you. It is not supposed to let you prefer MyBlogLog users over non-MyBlogLog users. MyBlogLog needs to promote a mentality through the MyBlogLog blog that will allow people to realize that they should not avoid visiting sites that do not appear in their MyBlogLog stats.

3. Using MyBlogLog makes you depend on MyBlogLog servers for your site to load

   The MyBlogLog code loads a lot of things from the MyBlogLog servers. That means if the MyBlogLog servers go down, your site will load slow or keep loading. That has happened to me a lot, where my site has taken up to a minute to load simply because some image from the MyBlogLog server was not loading.

4. MyBlogLog widget is not customizable

   When you show the MyBlogLog code or the widget on your site, one of the only things you can customize is the colors. Otherwise, you are stuck with showing the standard format of the MyBlogLog widget, including the advertisement link that points back to their site.

   Some people may say that a free service comes with a link pointing back to the service. My point here is not to argue whether or not the link back to MyBlogLog should be necessary; what I am showing you is one of the things that show how and why the MyBlogLog widget is not customizable.

5. MyBlogLog communities are spammable blogrolls in disguise

   These can be two points, though I will combine them as one. The MyBlogLog communities are supposedly places where people can interact and find out more about each other. In reality, the MyBlogLog communities are nothing more than blogrolls. MyBlogLog communities currently display only the names and links to people and sites you are associated with.

   MyBlogLog does allow you to e-mail other people, though that has resulted in spam messages, including people sending “Thank you for visiting me” emails to you everytime you visit their site or MyBlogLog profile, probably resulting in spam advertisement to be disguised in unwanted “thank you” e-mails. Such a trend is increasing, turning MyBlogLog into more of a MySpace community where many spammers spam every profile they come across just to get someone to visit a specific profile in return.

So, what is the verdict?

The verdict is that you have to figure out your own verdict. If the above things are insignificant to you and you still consider MyBlogLog to have an actual purpose, go ahead and keep hugging MyBlogLog. Personally, I am still using the MyBlogLog service as of this post, as it does one thing for me that has made me keep it on my site: it shows me new MyBlogLog members who visit my site. It does introduce new people to me, and it is easy to find out who has visited my site.

How Yahoo’s control of MyBlogLog is shaping things

One of the things, in addition to the above list, that I would love MyBlogLog to have is to allow anonymous users to register their site addresses, using relevant e-mail addresses from the same site domain, so that people are not required to register new accounts, but are allowed to enter in a url that is kept in a cookie or associated with their IP. That way, we can have more non-MyBlogLog members tracked also.

However, considering the fact that Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, we may probably see more strict registration requirements where people who do not register will continue to be left out of the MyBlogLog service. Recently Yahoo announced about improving MyBlogLog, though the above issues are not being addressed yet, according to the announcement. At least it is a good thing that Yahoo is working on improving some things about the service it acquired not too long ago.

What do you think?

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The e-mail that Broc sent me was short, up to the point and polite. That throws me into a dilemma: should I look at that e-mail as one of the many e-mails Broc has sent to dozens of bloggers, or do I look at the e-mail as something that only concerns me?

Things I see if I observe mass e-mails as being part of a group

If I look at the overall thing that Broc did and is doing, I can say that he is mass e-mailing his contest to everyone he knows in order to promote his site. That is clear mass spamming in the eyes of many people, it not most, as promoting any idea through mass e-mails is spam in the minds of many, whether or not the e-mails in question are relevant to a blog or an individual. Thus, I notice the following points about mass emailings:

• The e-mail offers some value to me when I am part of a group
• The announcement was mass e-mailed to many people, thus I do not feel extra special
• The e-mail can be considered spam or non-spam, depending on how my group [the blogosphere group] looks at mass e-emails, regardless of the email content
• The e-mail can also be considered either spam or non-spam depending on the type of activities the group is involved in. For example, a group based on human rights activities may view a mass e-mailing about credit card offers to be spam, but may view mass e-mailings about credit cards that donate money to victims of human rights abuse as being good.

Things I see if I observe mass e-mails as an individual

If I look at the e-mail as an individual, from my perspective and observe things based on how Broc approached me and what he offered to me and my readers, it seems like a good e-mail that may benefit people in the long run. This goes along with what I am saying in the new Reader Appreciation Project. Thus, the points for this perspective are:

• The e-mail offers some value to me as an individual and to my readers
• The announcement was e-mailed to me directly.
• The e-mail can be either spam or non-spam, depending on how I view such e-mails and their content
• The e-mail can also be judged based on what I think about different things and how I feel. I may be tired and may view such an e-mail as being spam, while I may be exhausted but if I get such an e-mail from a friend, I may view it as being non-spam.

The way you look at mass e-mail probably depends on what you think about mass e-mails in general and the way you think. You may also judge e-mails based on how you are approached by different people in different situations.

Broc’s e-mail is both spam and non-spam

I think some people may delete or even block Broc’s email, as mass e-mailing regardless of having good or bad intentions, is still mass e-mailing. I prefer the concept of giving back to the readers without making them do extra stuff, like making readers join communities, but giving back something is a good step in the right direction that Broc is taking, compared to the thousands of bloggers out there who are not giving readers anything back.

What is your view on this? Do you look at incoming e-mails from your own individual and personal perspective? Or do you look at e-mails from the perspective of a community and see if everyone is being mass e-mailed or not with the same message and then look at any possible benefits?

As for me, I joined Broc’s MyBlogLog community myself in order to keep my opinion in the matter lean less towards calling the e-mail a form of mass “spamming“, and to bring up an interesting point that we need to think about when looking at mass emails. I also want to see if I get a printer along the way or not. Even though my current printer is on the verge of death, the printer from Broc’s MyBlogLog contest will go back to the readers through the Reader Appreciation Project.

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