Alex Pooley’s Blog

A few days ago I signed up with MyBlogLog after seeing their widget on the TechCrunch sidebar. I only signed up on impulse, but it’s been a changing experience so far.

At MyBlogLog you basically create a profile, and stick their widget on your blog if you have one (I stuck their widget on the right of my blog). Every time you visit a blog with their widget you are recorded as visiting that site. Through this simple system, communities are able to bubble to the surface as visits transform in to implied memberships. You can explore communities and the people that are members of them.

What has really stuck for me though, is the power of the social network. Up until now I didn’t really grok the social “phenomenon”. Sure, I understood the viral aspects behind it, but I didn’t understand why the “consumers” cared. To me, places like MySpace, flickr, del.icio.us, etc just don’t fall in my field of interest. I don’t read digg, memeorandum, etc and generally have very little to do with social networking. The irony is that I have felt disconnected! It doesn’t help that I’m in Australia, and that the Internet power plays are occurring over in the US of A. It doesn’t help that 95% of my random emails to strangers never get replies! So yeh yeh, what does all this have to do with MyBlogLog? Well…

After signing up with MyBlogLog I started seeing who was visiting my blog, my gracious and ever delightful readers now had faces, and interests in other sites. They were no longer abstract theoretical entities implied from an aggregation of my visitor statistics. There are real people reading this thing! After a few days people started adding themselves to my blog community, adding me as a contact to their profiles, and consequently I started adding myself to their communities and subscribing to their blogs. The backbone of my growing network is not vanity, but curiosity and opportunity. Curiosity, because I wonder why people are interested in me, and who these people are; and opportunity because I am forming associations with people when just a few days ago I was entirely isolated!

Before I finish, please let me clear this up. I’m not one for “networking” with potential business partners, clients, etc. It’s just not me – though I’m beginning to wonder about the line between serendipity and networking. However I am interested in meeting like minded people and seeing what they’re in too. So, if you think I’ll be interested in your blog, your community, or your business then please add me as a contact and I’ll give you a shot! or if you’re still stuck in last week, you could always just email me.

Also, while writing this post I remembered how I never grokked blogging until I started blogging myself. The commenting and trackbacks are terrific. Maybe I should act on impulse a bit more often!