Yahoo! Buys MyBlogLog

January 9th, 2007

Wow, that was fast. I only signed up for MyBlogLog a week ago, and they just announced they’ve been bought by Yahoo!. TechCrunch estimates the price was around $10–12 million.

Here’s my MyBlogLog review from not even last week.

Since then, I’ve actually noticed a side benefit of the website: I’m discovering many new, cool blogs I never knew existed. The service itself is a filter of sorts — the people who sign up are pretty passionate and really into blogging, which is reflected in their writing.

There is a social networking aspect as well, in that each blog forms the basis of a “community.” As members join a blog’s community, said blog is being ranked, digg-style, by its number of members. The inference is the blogs with the biggest communities will be the ones worth reading, and this will change over time as people join and leave.

But there’s also some technology in addition to these social networking elements. MyBlogLog has traffic-tracking that lets a blogger see where users came from, what they looked at, and what links they clicked on within their blog. It’s the first Web 2.0 service I’ve come across recently that I’d consider paying for (and I think regular readers may realize that’s really something coming from me, since I won’t even pony up for Linden dollars). I think this is called the “freemium” business model — which is something Yahoo! is already doing with flickr. Lastly, who knows what fun stuff Yahoo! can learn from all this blog-tracking data.

So MyBlogLog has a combination of technology, social networking, plus a service that can be sold. Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how the team moves forward with Yahoo!, as it tries to wash the taste of peanut butter out of its maw with the Kool-Aid that is Web 2.0.

Note: For some interesting backstory on MyBlogLog, check out GigaOM.