MyBlogLog

» see mybloglog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the anglo-blog community used mybloglog. that was not my crowd. i was on donanimhaber and frmtr in the late 2000s, where the equivalent identity layer was a forum signature with your hardware specs in it, not a widget that showed your face on someone else's sidebar. mybloglog assumed you had a wordpress or typepad blog, that other people with wordpress or typepad blogs were reading it, and that you wanted to make the social graph between you and them visible. the entire premise required a very specific tier of hobby blogger that mostly lived in english.

eric marcoullier and todd sampson founded the company in january 2005, with the public service going live in march. the product was a small javascript widget you pasted into your blog template. the widget showed the last few visitors who had also been logged in to mybloglog, with their avatars and a link to their own blog. on the back end you could see your own visitor analytics: who had stopped by, what they had clicked, where they had come from. it was a precursor to the disqus / gravatar / facebook-comments layer that would later try to glue blog identities together. when blogs were the dominant publishing surface in 2006-2008, mybloglog was suddenly everywhere.

yahoo bought it in january 2007 for an estimated ten million dollars, partly to get marcoullier and sampson into the building. inside yahoo it became part of the same boulevard of social-media bets that included flickr, delicious, jumpcut, and upcoming. when carol bartz took over in 2009 and the cuts started, almost all of those properties were on the list. yahoo announced the mybloglog shutdown on february 24 2011 with a three-month wind-down. on may 24 the widget calls started returning errors, and the avatars on every sidebar that still had the embed went blank.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the widget worked by pinging mybloglog every time a logged-in user loaded a page that had the embed. it built a feed of recent visitors per blog, and a global graph of which blogs had overlapping audiences. for bloggers who were already obsessing over their analytics in google analytics or sitemeter, the visible-faces version added a social texture: you could see who had stopped by, click through to their blog, and start reading the people who were reading you. it created a loose discovery loop across the blogosphere that did not need a central feed reader.

~ the slide ~

after the yahoo acquisition the product stopped getting interesting work done on it. marcoullier left within about a year. the team got moved around inside yahoo's developer-network reorgs. by 2009 the widget still functioned but the back-end interface had become an old-feeling site that nobody had refreshed since 2008. meanwhile the actual social graph of bloggers had migrated to twitter, where the same identity-reciprocity loop worked on a much faster cadence and did not require a sidebar embed. mybloglog kept running for two more years out of momentum.

~ what got buried with it ~

the visible visitor-graph idea did not survive in any clean form. disqus inherited some of the cross-site identity layer for comments. gravatar inherited the cross-site avatar layer. but the specific gesture of showing other readers' faces on someone else's blog, as ambient texture rather than as a comment thread, did not really come back. partly because the blog format itself receded under twitter and facebook. partly because the post-2010 web learned to be more guarded about who saw who reading what. the sidebars of 2026 are mostly empty of widgets. the ones that remain are usually a list of the last five posts and a search box.

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