Rant About It

Bloggers have invested billions or hours of their time into MyBlogLog and many of them have paid money to the service throughout the years.   

Yahoo has made the decision to shut down MyBlogLog much to the dismay and anger of the blogging community.    Certainly Yahoo has the right to make such a move; probably referred to behind  closed-doors as “strategically” it makes perfect sense to shut down MyBlogLog as we paid around $12 million for the site,  it has not provided a sufficient ROI and we have milked bloggers for all of their personal details so that we can now move as many of them as possible to our “Yahoo Pulse.”

The official sign on the front door says,  ”MyBlogLog will no longer be in service from 24 May 2011. We recommend Yahoo! Pulse as a service for you to see all your social updates from your favorite networks in one place.

With Yahoo! Pulse, you can create your own identity on Yahoo! and you can easily connect and engage with the people, content, and applications that matter to you, wherever you are on Yahoo!.

If you have questions about these changes, please visit the Yahoo! MyBlogLog help pages.

Thank you for being part of MyBlogLog.”

As a blogger  I’d feel very special and as though what I had done for MyBlogLog and Yahoo over the past 4 years really mattered to the company.  Wouldn’t you?   They certainly acknowledge me as a blogger in their closing the doors “sign.”    Don’t they?    It is surprising that they don’t even mention the word “blogger” as they shut down a service which bloggers sent them millions of visitors a year and took the time to build the MyBlogLog brand on their blogs by displaying the all too familiar MyBlogLog Recent Reader widget.    I suppose they are justified because bloggers clearly benefitted from all the traffic that was sent to them through the network.    So sorry bloggers we can’t afford to maintain the service and it simply doesn’t make sense in our portfolio or are future vision of Yahoo!  ”Yes, we certainly do have a strategic vision for our company.”

On January 18th, 2007,  Pete Cashmore confirmed on Mashable that “Yahoo acquire MyBlogLog.”   Credit to Pete when he said,  ”I’m yet to be convinced by MyBlogLog, although it certainly has potential. The issue right now is that it hasn’t really moved beyond the tech crowd (they’re also making inroads into real estate blogs they say), and while you can currently post these widgets to MySpace, it remains to be seen whether they can master that market, which is radically different to serving geeky bloggers.”

Yet,  what about the bloggers.  They certainly used MyBlogLog to connect with each other and connect with readers.     At the time Yahoo had a healthy attitude to what it would take to build a community.  Yes, it happens one member at a time, one blog at a time.   Apparently their attitude was not all about let’s look at the short term bottom line because we haven’t figured out exactly how to connect with bloggers.     Perhaps that is the problem.   Yahoo! cannot connect with bloggers because it’s very difficult for the large corporations to understand that blogging is not about them, blogging is about real people, with real lives, who care about their voices being heard,  and who care about the people they connect with.

Yahoo apparently understood this at the time of the acquisition when they said on “Yodel Anecdotal:”  

“At Yahoo!, we have a global community of over a half a billion users, and we’re always looking for ways to better connect the people in that community to each other and to the communities (large and small) that they care about. MyBlogLog helps us do this like never before. If blogging was originally about building a community and having a conversation with people in that community, then MyBlogLog provides the missing link that makes those connections more real.

When I first saw MyBlogLog, I experienced one of those “Aha! This is really cool!” moments. When I put the widget code on my own blog and saw the first visitor stop by, I felt the same rush of connectedness that I felt when I got my first comment on Flickr. It makes sense then that MyBlogLog follows in a line of key acquisitions that includes Flickr and other leading social media sites like del.icio.us and Upcoming. Taken together, these vibrant web communities continue to provide Yahoo! with a deeper understanding of communities and user activity that reach beyond the Yahoo! network.”

Yahoo certainly understands community now.    Aha! This is one of those really cool moments when Yahoo perhaps doesn’t want anyone yoddeling Yahoo! is CLOSING MYBLOGLOG down and dragging it out so that maybe nobody will notice.  

Why did they wait so long?  Data?  Look back and see their aggressive approach at getting as much data from bloggers as possible.    Now they have played “connect the dots” for as long as they can and left a community in shreds.   They pillaged and pilfered a property and “taken” personal information from bloggers that can now be moved into other assets in the hopes of generating a higher ROI.   Ahhhh! is that what they meant by “understanding communities and user activity.”   Now that makes sense.

What is fascinating to me,  as an owner of BlogCatalog,  is that Yahoo does not care.  They do not care that they could make a real difference in this world with one simple move and that is to let users of MyBlogLog know that they have an alternative service that will cater to a blogger’s needs.   Why?  Who?  What?

Why?  BlogCatalog isn’t a public company so we  can decide how and where to invest our money.   Our pride and joy is BloggersUnite.org a site designed for bloggers to unite around causes and make a difference.    What would a simple connection between MyBlogLog and BloggersUnite.org mean to the world?   One life saved  because one blogger from MyBlogLog didn’t know about BloggersUnite.org and now they do?     Perhaps more?

The cynic could suggest that MyBlogLog doesn’t know about BlogCatalog, that tiny company located somewhere in Texas.   The cynic would be wrong.   Greg Cohen of Yahoo and I spoke at SXSW a year ago about taking over MyBlogLog.  They wanted to know our plans.  We shared some of them though were not going to hand over the “sauce.”    Interesting enough even after laying out what we would do and how we could enable Yahoo! to save face, they would rather shut it down.

Since blogging is about transparency and social media is about transparency,  perhaps not total, though much more so than business has ever been,  here’s the outline that was sent to Greg and his Yahoo colleagues.    As the CEO of BlogCatalog I am still inviting Yahoo! to leave the door open.  Do not shut it.  We don’t want any of the “dots.”  

What we do want is for MyBlogLog to continue or at least have the blogging community that you cared about stay connected via your widgets and statistics packages and communities that people took hours to build.   Yes,  FriendConnect took your space on blogs.   Fred Wilson couldn’t foresee that either.   It did the same to us.

Yet the blogosphere hasn’t lost its purpose.  Your service is a valuable one it simply needs a champion.     A champion like BlogCatalog who will ensure that the voice of the people is heard.   The cost of shutting down MyBlogLog as distribution channel is much larger than you are taking responsibility for.    Please do not ignore this social responsibility.

The costs to Yahoo! of working something out with BlogCatalog will be negligible compared to the costs of a shutdown.    We will make it a simple transaction.  

Yahoo! do the right thing and stretch out your hand and give bloggers the attention they deserved since you bought the site.    It’s time to bridge the gap between big-media and bloggers.   This move does exactly the opposite.  It is seen as a “rape and pillage” strategy by many bloggers.    

Here are the benefits of a BlogCatalog / MyBlogLog company, as shared with Yahoo over 1 year ago, when they first announced that a  closure was imminent:

  BlogCatalog + MyBlogLog + BloggersUnite.org – Combining Strengths 

About BlogCatalog

 Mission – to provide value to bloggers and blog readers

 Detail Info

Ø  Over 400,000 approved blogs with an average of 10,000 new blogs that are “hand approved” and curated each month.  

Ø  24 million annual visitors

Ø  One of top global sites – ranked 2,000 by Alexa

Ø  BC developed widgets sit on blogs as do MyBlogLogs providing a network for bloggers and their readers to connect

Ø  Bloggersunite.org as a platform for bloggers to promote social causes that when jointly promoted to MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog members can make a substantial positive impact to a world that desperately needs the “voice of the people” to be united.

Our View of MBL

Ø  Still maintains a good brand name in the blogosphere

Ø  Large community of bloggers

Ø  Stats widget is a valuable feature

Ø  Innovation and growth has stalled

 Our Vision for MyBlogLog

Ø  Maintain MBL as a distinct site

Ø  Improve the design and user functionality

Ø  Strengthen and grow the MBL distributive social network

Ø  Promote the best features of MBL to BC members

Ø  Expose the MBL community to BC Opportunities

Why BC

Ø  Ease of transition due to similar business model

Ø  One of the largest and most successful sites focused on serving bloggers

Ø  Experienced management and web 2.0 team

Ø  Successful track record in turn-around situations

Ø  Requisite resources and commitment to enhance MBL

I am not certain an offer has been made to Yahoo! on a blog before though it could not be more appropriate.  Could it?  It is somewhat ironic though that’s part of the fun of social media.   Yahoo!  

So Yahoo! lets get together and chat and do what’s right.  What do you say?

Best,  Tony Berkman,  CEO BlogCatalog 

ps. wrote this in a hurry.  probably could have tweeted it more easily.  I will come back and edit it though though the offer to keep your bloggers happy is on the table :)

In the meantime here is an interesting link

http://ycorpblog.com/2007/01/08/bloggers-unite-yahoo-joins-forces-with-mybloglog/

http://twitter.com/mybloglog  last updated March 2009

http://everwas.com/2010/01/how-to-export-your-data-from-mybloglog.html

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/the_site_she_gr.html

(Source: mybloglog.com)