MyBlogLog, a distributed social network which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year, will launch a tagging feature later this evening that will allow users to add descriptive tags to the people and blogs (called “communities”) on the service.
The new feature serves a number of purposes, founder Eric Marcoullier told me this evening. The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page (ours is here) and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word.
The company is also asking users to help fight spam by tagging spammy sites with the word “Schmoe,” which they say stands for “Social Media Optimizer” (SchMOe). The team will review those tags and associated sites and take appropriate action.
Tags can be added by any user to any other user or blog community. Once a tag is added, others can vote it up or down which increases or decreases its size in the cloud. The owner of a profile can permanently remove any tag. The company is importing tags for blogs from Del.icio.us and Technorati to get initial content; they say they will add other sources as well over time.
The new feature is based on a Yahoo internal tool developed by Cameron Marlow at their Berkeley research center, called Tagsona. Yahoo employees use Tagsona to tag co-workers internally (sounds like loads of fun).
MyBlogLog continues to expand. Marcoullier says they are tracking 100 million monthly visitors to sites that have the MyBlogLog widget, and have 140,000 registered users. Just recently, he said, more people without blogs (readers only) started registering than users with blogs.
The service will be redesigned, and possibly renamed, later this year.