My sidebar still has the MyBlogLog widget hanging around. It’s mostly for the benefit of visitors who are MyBlogLog users; it gives their sites or blogs the extra exposure by allowing people to click on their avatars and visit their sites.
But I don’t use MyBlogLog anymore. It’s probably been half a year since I logged in, and half a year in this digital age is a very long time.
Why did I start using MyBlogLog? I thought it would be an easy way to build my blog community around it.
The problem is, I didn’t intend WebGrrrl.net to be a place for me to network; this blog is merely a place for me to share what I discover and learn. Over time, I guess this blog did kind of gotten a life of its own, and a little build-up of followers seemed to be a natural way of its evolving to be what it is today.
Like many other social bookmarking / networking sites, using MyBlogLog is hard work if you’re counting on it to bring traffic to your blog. Think about this though: do you spend more time online searching for information and solving problems, or do you spend more time networking with people?
If you’re looking for answers to your problems, a service like MyBlogLog might not be the first thing that comes to mind — you’d be going straight to the Big G or the Yoddeling search engine and do you stuff from there. However, if you can spare the time and really do enjoy connecting with other people, then you should definitely continue to work the MyBlogLog sites and such.
When it comes down to it, I’m just as happy blogging for the sake of blogging. It’s great to know new people, but I don’t necessarily need to. I’ll still keep the MBL widget, though, as a courtesy to my blog visitors. Giving back links are always a nice to do.
Check out my other posts: « One Post A Day (OPAD) Challenge 2009 / WebGrrrl.com: pwnd! »
I started using the MBL widget not so long ago so I realy have no idea at this moment if I should keep using it.
It’s OK to leave the widget as it is in your blog, but if you feel that it slows down your site loading or if it doesn’t serve any real purpose, then I think MBL widget should be the first to go.
I’ve used MBL for my previous blog but had to delete it since I don’t really see it’s purpose for me.. Neway, it seems that you’ve built your community:-)
I guess within the span of 3 years, it’s somewhat inevitable 🙂
I have to admit that I always use it when starting out a new blog. The great thing about it is that you can easily make people aware of your blog through MBL. Whenever you add someone as your friend in MBL they will instantly get an email from MBL telling them about it.
Since very few people are using MBL these days an email like that will probably be opened and your site checked out. Then all you have to do is make sure that they subscribe to your RSS feed.
/Mikael
It really gives a good intoduction to your sites or blogs to the visitors but still very few people are using MBL as they don’t know the proper purpose or use of it.
I got sick of this service very quickly and haven’t used it in over a year.