When I joined MyBlogLog back in February, I tried to only join communities where I was reading the blog. This kept the number that I was a member of down and even now I am only a member of 84 communities. As time moves on some of these are less regularly visited than others and in a lot of cases using the RSS feed means that I only visit if I want to leave a comment.
It always annoyed me when I was left messages in the community or to me in public with links in. I always ranted to myself that if I wanted to follow up on the message, I was quite capable of clicking on the avatars and finding the blog without a link. I know it was really advertising the blog to search engines and anyone who could read it. After I put a note in my profile for no links, any messages left with links got deleted regardless of the content. If the message was sent in private that wasn’t a problem as the person had taken the time to send me information rather than using me as advertising.
The community idea of MyBlogLog is great and I have found many great blogs by searching the community of a blog I enjoy. For this reason, I have also joined communities that I have found interesting as I may have similar interests to other visitors to that blog. I can see how some people who are very active and spend a lot of time promoting their blogs can be members of hundreds or thousands of communities. However, just because I have shown an interest in the blog and joined the community does not mean that I want to start receiving mass mailings sent to that community. In many other groups and forums you have to agree to receive this type of mailing and so to suddenly have this introduced with no option to disable mass community messages other than leave the community, I am not exactly over the moon. As Ilker pointed out on The MyBlogLog Blog comments , an issue with this is that the messages are not sent in private, which means that the message and any spam links are visible for all to see including search engines, so not only do you get unrequested messages but you are an advertising hording for someone else. In Ilker’s case the more popular you are the more advertising you give.
This wasn’t going to be a rant about the new ability on MyBlogLog to sent messages to all your community members in one go, but it sort of ended up as one. I shall be watching to see what changes are introduced.
That said, the other changes to the community page are great.
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I have no idea what you are talking about so obviously I have not explored the possibilities of MyBlogLog.
I’ve never understood how you join communities as I only see how to add someone as a contact.
I recently found out how to expand the log to 10 avatars and I see one blog I visit has 30 showing. No idea how he does that.
regards
jmb
Hi jmb,
When you are looking at a community on MyBlogLog, for example Vijay’s at http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/scanman/ you will see Join Community at the top right under Tools, in the same way you add a contact when you are looking at a persons profile.
This then adds your avatar to the community. They are currently listed in number of visits/views (not quite sure which), so the more often you visit a blog, the closer to the top you appear. This then means that others visiting that blog see you and may click on your avatar to check you out and hopefully visit your blog.
I hope that makes sense and explains why its a good idea.
Regards,
Ian
Hi jmb,
I’ve just re-read your comment.
To increase the number of avatars displayed you have to change the MyBlogLog code that you add for the widget. There is a bit of the code that says ‘c_rows=10&’ if you change the number in here it changes the number of avatar rows.
Regards,
Ian