I have now used MyBlogLog long enough to give some impressions on it, and unfortunately I can’t say that I’m impressed. Infact the first thing that comes to mind “what’s the point?” The idea seems to be pretty simple and straight forward. In addition to tracking stats for your blog, it offers some basic networking features. This involves creating a “community” for your blog, that other members can join, as well as a basic list of friends, or contacts as they are called there.

Now I must admit that the tracking of various data for your blog, which I guess was the original idea behind MyBlogLog, can be pretty useful. The idea of publically displaying the latest blog readers also is a good one. Unfortunately when I tried it out, it was pretty hard to customize so I couldn’t make it fit in to the design of my blog, and it also seemed to slow down my blog.

But that’s where the list of positive things I have to say about MyBlogLog ends. The other on-site features unfortunately seem to be halted by the fact that they have been thrown on top of the site, in an attempt to expand it with some extra features. Messaging between members for instance is quirky at best, and quite unorganized and hard to keep track of.

The lack of intutivity in the setup isn’t the worst part of it however. No, that has to go to the members of the site, who in my oh-so-humble opinion have turned it into a haven for spam of all types. Within a few hours of joining the site, I had around five “admirers”. That is people who added me to their list of contacts.

Now I am all for networking and making new contacts and all that which has been standarized with “Web 2.0″. What I don’t like however is having a list of contacts who I’ve never even exchanged as much as a single word with, which pretty much seems to be the norm over at MyBlogLog. A MySpace-esque contest about making as many friends as possible as quick as can be, and you will seem important, or something like it at least. And of course, let’s not forget the possibility that your contacts might even check out your blog, and hopefully even join its MyBlogLog-community, which would be the ultimate utopia!

This seriously represents all of what is wrong with the web currently. All of these possibilites to make new acquaintances seems to have come a little prematurely, as people are overwhelmed with it and wants to have as many new friends as the possibly can. Nevermind the actual purpose of it, which should be communication, exchanging thoughts, ideas, favours and all that goes hand in hand with actual networking.

Of course all of this can’t be blamed on MyBlogLog, but rather accredited to the way users think about networking. Are we putting too much emphasis on these possibilites, making users overly excited about it to the point where they just abuse the system? As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t actually have the answers to all of these questions. I will definately be investigating it though through my own experiences with my own projects, and hopefully I’ll eventually have some useful information to share with the lot of you. Until that is a reality however, let’s just hope that the people over at MyBlogLog can take some measures to limit these flaws of the community, because if they do, it would definately have the potential to be quite a pleasant place to kill some time.

I was recently invited to participate in a private beta testing of VIRB.com, which is a brand new “MySpace clone”, in the sense that it offers many of the same socializing features that MySpace helped popularize. Before I get started, let me just say that I have tried out both MySpace and Facebook, without ever really getting into it. Partly because they seemed to lack a “hook”, so to say, in the sense that they never really managed to offer me anything of actual value. In the case of Facebook however, I must say that I’ve always had a thing for the look and feel of the site. Infact I’d actually consider it the complete opposite of MySpace’s horrible user interface.

VIRB however, takes it to a whole new level. I have quite simply fallen in love with the whole UI of the site. It’s intuitive as can be from what I’ve seen so far, and the whole feel of it is very polished and extremely stylish, and of course it sports a host of different “Web 2.0-ish” design elements. I know I can’t resist a nice mix of all that!

The good people over at Unborn Media, famous for their work with PureVolume, are also behind VIRB, and that alone should be incentive to give it a try. I haven’t given it a full testrun just yet, but some of the basic features include photo and video uploading, as well as the expected networking features like friendlists, personal and private messaging and so forth. A pretty cool feature is that you have complete control over the CSS-elements in your profile, which makes it easy to customize the look and feel of it.

As soon as I get the time, I will give it a more extensive testrun, and write about it here on my blog. Until that however, I have quite a few invites to the beta program, so if you’re interested in checking it out, post a comment (again, with a valid e-mail, that will never be shown to the public) and I’ll send an invite your way!

I haven’t written an interesting blog post for a while, but hopefully some people will find this interesting. It seems that the leading blog search engine Technorati has launched a new feature which more or less directly challenges the oh-so-popular Digg. There does seem to be some fundamental differences however, which I will look in to.

The choice of name for their new feature is certainly interesting, to say the least. They seem to try and brand it as “WTF”, which doesn’t stand for what you’ll obviously think, but rather “Where’s the Fire“. Now I don’t know what clever guys they’ve hired at the Technorati offices, but I sure hope they’re not being paid a lot at all, because that idea behind the name is so stupid it instantly makes me think “WTF?” - Or wait, maybe that’s the genius of it?

Regardless, moving on to the next points. Just like Digg, Where’s the Fire lets people submit stories and news, or “blurbs” as they call it over there, that they find interesting, and then other people can vote for it if they find it interesting as well. Not a new concept by any means, but Where’s the Fire gives it an interesting twist. Instead of just being a place for people to submit links to articles they’ve found, they rather encourage people to write their own stories. By using other hot stories, they are supposed to write their own thoughts on the hot topics and just include links to the sources.

This also omits the need for a comments system such as the one at for instance Digg, because the stories, or blurbs themselves are comments on already existing stories, that can be voted up or down. The idea itself is definately interesting, and with the popularity of Technorati it should become a very good opportunity for sensible people to get their voices to stand out from the nonsense buzzing of the crowd that seems to dictate the comments at similar sites. It is also a nice alternative to Digg where the general conscience seems to be that bloggers don’t write interesting stories.

The “danger” of course, is the same as in every community where democracy is a pillar, which is abuse of the system. People can group together and form their own circles where they vote eachother stories up for personal gain, but this is nothing new and is faced by all similar sites, and hopefully they have already taken appropriate measures to guard themselves against this at Technorati already.

All in all I am excited by the prospect of what WTF (Where’s the Fire) can bring to the table, and hopefully it will be a nice opportunity for bloggers that aren’t widely recognized to gain some well-deserved exposure!

Edit: If you like this story, you can WTF-it here! I like that, WTF-it =)

I had just barely gotten out my board, in other words my MacBook, and was surfing some fine waves around the World Wide Web, and somehow I suddenly found myself reading an article on Slashdot about Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg. I’ve already mentioned Digg.com in a couple of the posts since the re-opening of my blog, and my fascination for the concept is anything but a secret.

While reading the mentioned article, I was able to catch a nice wave which took me to among other things this, this and of course this, which is Digg founder Kevin Rose’s reply to some of the “accusations” being made. Coincidentally right now as I am writing this, the clock is 9:11 (conspiracy theory time!), but I tried to make a simple search at Digg for Digg Censorship and Digg Conspiracy, just to see what popped up. The results were so-and-so, meaning that I even though I searched for as for back as their archives go there were no results on what I was looking for.

Coincident? Perhaps, since articles on Digg that are marked as lame or just reported are removed from the search database. And just that is one of my main beefs with Digg. It’s a great concept, but surely a policy of completely removing any article that just a few users dislike for one reason or another can only be characterized as censorship? I don’t know what Digg’s current going ratio of Diggs and Negative Reports for an article to be removed altogether is, but I have a feeling that one of the reasons they don’t have a firm policy on this is so that the people sitting behind the steering wheel can remove articles at their own discretion.

The only way that they can get closer to achieving what they are aiming for, a democratic user-driven system, is to open up on this area. Set a ratio for what’s acceptable and not, because if the majority finds an article interesting a select few shouldn’t be able to deprive the rest from reading it just by reporting it as “lame”. Of course it then becomes a given that it must be completely in the open how many “negative diggs” an article has, and the articles that are deemed useless must still be accessible so that people can still see it and form their own opinion and thereafter digg it or mark it as lame.

I’m actually quite surprised that steps haven’t been taken already by the people in charge of Digg, as it is an obvious flaw with the current system, and one that has only become more highlighted as they have grown in popularity. With the current setup a select few people are given too much control over what’s hot and not at Digg, and their self-imposed goal of being a democratic source for news controlled by the readers is without any shed of a doubt neglected.

Please note that I am not posting this because I in any way feel victimized or targeted by Digg, but simply because I felt the need to point out the obvious flaws in the way Digg is currently operated. I do however question the music taste of Digg’s visitors, seeing how this article is dugg into the heavens, while the news of a free Jack’s Mannequin EP doesn’t get any attention! That’s a completely different matter though. I am also going to post this on Digg of course, to see what kind of reaction I get.