I have twittered it, twined it and now i have to blog it because i am finding this javascript that Kent Brewster built using the MyBlogLog APIs and Yahoo! Tubes so useful/entertaining. (and because i tend to believe there are three different audiences in those different medians anyway).Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb wrote a post from the point of view of a large traffic site editor (himself) who could use BlogJuice to learn more about the community that is visiting his site. I don't have a huge trafficked site or even a MyBlogLog visitor widget on this blog-but i am a MyBlogLog user which means that as i visit sites that have the MyBlogLog recent visitor widget, my mug is displayed like the example on the right from the PR2.0 blog. Clicking on my image/name takes you to my MyBlogLog profile page which i have populated with information about me and some of services i use including LinkedIn, Twitter, del.cio.us, Digg, Facebook etc.
My first look at MyBlogLog a while ago scared me off i admit- why would i want to leave a crumb of where i had been, did i really want any reader to a random blog to be able to get to my profile? But then i started thinking about it being like a 'calling card' that i control- a 'hey daniela was here and she reads what you read and this is what she is ok sharing with you' and i thought it would be a good way to network with those that have the same interests as i do.
So that is all fine and dandy, i can visit other visitor's MyBlogLog pages by clicking on their icon/name, and then clicking on their profiles-great- but i would have to do it one by one and very rarely have I actually done that unless it was for example a familiar face i had recently seen at a local meet-up or something.
So now comes BlogJuice a simple bookmarklet that you drag to your tool bar that uses the MyBlogLog API and was built by Kent Brewster who works at Yahoo! (but it is not an official Yahoo! product). When you land on any page that has the MyBlogLog recent readers widget, you simply click on the bookmarklet and a pop up window starts populating the profiles of the people that previously visited that site. Of course the more MyBlogLog users fill in their profiles the more useful this will be. For example when i landed on PR 2.0 this morning i was able to see the LinkedIn Profile for another visitor who could be a possible connection:
Some del.ciou.s tags that other visitors are using- a possible connection of interests?
What they have been twittering - someone new to follow perhaps?
All interesting ways to connect with the community that is reading and participating in the same conversations that i am. Especially for someone like me that is always looking to connect with others and let's admit it a bit nosy to boot!Ian Kennedy, Product Manager at MyBlogLog has a recent post on Broadcasting your Life Online- that addresses the topic of the 'Living Web' and some new features that MyBlogLog will be releasing shortly that aggregate your life online. He also addresses the ways that they address personal privacy requirements.
Because i was lucky enough to see Kent at the SIG conference last week in which he presented this BlogJuice tool- i KNOW that my profile is available through it. I also was aware of the MyBlog API- so i knew that the information i put into the MyBlogLog service could be presented in various ways- and i am ok with that because i signed up for it in order to share and since it is an opt-in service all others have as well. So i see this as a tool that is just saving me clicks to each individual profile and providing a useful aggregated view.
But i do have a handful of these 'lifecasting' profile- such as Plaxo's Pluse, Facebook, etc. all i have had to input my userids to different services (it isn't easy to find some of them!), or signed up for some application which is a bit tedious. I hope through the work of the DataPortability project that i am part of, my Online Identify can be better condensed and managed across services like this.
Kent twittered this morning that he was having a glorious day off (today was president's day in the US) and was refactoring BlogJuice so i am sure it will only get better.
2 comments :
Kent is a rock star! What struck me about BlogJuice when he showed it to me was that he had basically turned the whole broadcast/subscribe paradigm on it's head. No need to 'follow' someone's twitter feed or 'subscribe' to someone's lifecasting feed.
With BlogJuice, you can basically do your social network catch-up on-demand, dynamically. What's cool about making it a bookmarklet (and why MyBlogLog's API is so cool) is that the social network that is exposed is completely contextual and thus always relevant.
This is just one of the coolest little apps I have seen in a long while. Very very cool.
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