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.
That has been my only real complaint with MyBlogLog, when I am searching for communities about particular subjects that current search feature is kind of lacking. Tagging should really help to plug that hole. Good work Eric.
Go, team, go.
Tags are up!
I’ve date this gold digging woman.
I took her out to shopping mall. Damn, she ate the whole wallet. I have to buy her clothes… clothes… heels…
Later, I took her resturant upper floor. We sit, chat, and laugh. Oh man,
She cut the cheese, farted like man.
I have question for guys…How do I get my money back?
Awfully charming that they can equate “social media optimizers” with spammers, now that they’ve got theirs! Hmph!
Marshall, it’s a silly name for spammers. We’re not down on social media peeps (most of us are social media peeps), but spammers suck.
maybe because they are looking for some engeneers some time ago…
the tags are great
http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/.....re_it.html
It is briefly overviewed on the hard to find blog. The blog should be obviously linked to from the MyBlogLog home page - many users would enjoy reading the updates.
This tagging feature is smart. and much needed. I actually like the fact that users can tag Schmoes… this might help keep the community quality higher, I would hate to be reviewing all the Schmoe tags.
The voting feature could be nice…. just as long as it does not become Gamed like digg. Anytime you add these types of features the schmoes will look for a way to manipulate it.
Great work on the new features!
Rodney
I think the natural progression of any “democratized” system is gaming. When all that you need is to find a bunch of people to do something at the same time, and you’re dealing with the internet — which honestly is the biggest bunch of relatively bored individuals on the face of the planet you have to realize that they really can’t help themselves.
Great new features guys. MyBlogLog really has teeth now.
psssst first link is missing the .com
awesome! I’m in the screenshot! fame is mine at last
dork!
It proves that tagging content goes mainstream!
now how to avoid spamming of false tags?
Thanks Robyn! If Robyn Tippins is on it, I have confidence that it’s going to get better. Great hire as community manager, MBL!
Heh heh, I’m screenshotting that Marshall.
… and la bloga, you can hide any tag from your page. if you’re falsely accused of being a schmoe, we’ll see that it’s not true by checking out your comment logs and no harm will be done.
Thats looks cool. I’d love to see the feature soon.
It’s not a bad idea or surprising. What’s a shame is that non-Latin tags don’t work
I tried tagging and for now less people have tagged and couldn’t able to see much sites with relevant with my tagging. So far i just browse to my account to view my blog status & now this feature has provided to browse across.
that’s a great added feature for MBL and to my surprise typed it over at twitter. and for originality I tagged myself because in all honesty, i didn’t know others are supposed to tag you. well, i know my blog better than others. so i save them the trouble.
i hope no devious mind will work on tagging anyone with just anything they want.
It is good. I just saw the feature and added my tags. I hope it is going to help the communities.After reading this article, I came to know that Yahoo acquired it.
I think this is a great addition to mybloglog. This will make it much easier for all of us to find blogs that contain content that’s particularly interesting to us or bloggers that have similar interests to ours, that we can connect with.
It does look like a good value add; RBowles
I think it will focus people to surf to where they want to go faster, and the search engines will really eat this; thus giving little more of an advantage in SEO. It’s the future! Years from now, watch how many others will be doing this.
i used to use mybloglog a lot but i find now its just full of people spamming their blog and trying to sell useless stuff. And to think i payed for a pro account and dont use it now.
Tagsona *is* a lot of fun. Cameron did an excellent job on it.
Well, I just spent a few minutes playing with it. Thumbs up, as it helps add some context and description to the sites without too much work on the user’s part.
It seems as though this is a great addition, but I’ve always thought that the site has a design feel that is just a bit too clunky/cheesy. They could be doing much more and expand in to the analytics and stat market in a meaningful way. I also think it detracts when people put up silly pictures.
Yeah I was wondering when I saw it earlier this week if it was a new feature or just the first time someone tagged me
As much as i like mybloglog feature, can somebody refer Eric to a graphic web designer?