MyBlogLog - Community for Your Blog

February 28, 2007

Last night, I was surfing around, making the usual rounds to keep up with what’s going on. I have noticed on other sites (and never thought much of it) this table of mug shots from a service called MyBlogLog. So, finally, I went ahead and checked it out. Very cool! Essentially, it is a community service where you sign up, get a profile, then as you surf around other blogs who are signed up with the service, you show up as a person who recently visited that blog. You’re in their blog log, so to speak. When I signed up for a profile, I set up WebbyOnline as one of my blog sites. I set up an avatar for myself and snapped a screenshot of this site for upload. This morning, I installed one of their “widgets” to the sidebar which will list out MyBlogLog members which visit WebbyOnline.

Its basically another networking opportunity, and one geared specifically to bloggers.

What is a bit intriguing to me is exactly how the hell they are tracking me. For example, I head on over to ProBlogger because I know they are using MyBlogLog. Sure enough, my mug shot appears in the widget on the left side. Now, I am not bothered by this because I signed up for it, but how exactly are they tracking my web surfing like that? I can only assume they are using a tracking cookie. I checked out my cookies list in Firefox and I do see cookies for “.mybloglog.com”. That period in front of the domain is for a sub-domain. My guess is that their widget/tracking javascript (the code I put into my website) is programmed to detect that cookie and it knows who I am.

You definitely wouldn’t want to sign up with MyBlogLog if you are a privacy freak. That said, most bloggers are not worried about protecting their identity otherwise they wouldn’t be blogging.