So MyBlogLog has tagging. Yawn. Then I saw Andy Beal highlighted this part of MyBlogLog’s post about the new feature

Spam – If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer).

Internally, you know, I like to call anyone who stereotypes an entire industry by the actions of a small number within it kind of stupid.

Fair enough to ask anyone seeing MyBlogLog spam to tag that with the word spam. But calling an entire industry a bunch of spammers? Not smart, frankly, when some of those in that industry also have communities that thrive on MyBlogLog. Oh, and not smart when MyBlogLog is just one of many Yahoo properties that effectively sit at the top of the social media optimization food chain by optimizing the "social" to drive everything to them.

I’d write more, but I have to go delete some of the spam that so easily shows up in our Search Engine Land community on MyBlogLog because there remains no way to allow messages to sit in moderation and the "Report Spam" feature causes an email to be sent to MyBlogLog customer service rather than yanking that user out and putting them in a queue for review.

No, instead I get to manually "hide" members every week, when I remember to go in and play police force because MyBlogLog doesn’t provide the basic tools it could — and should — provide.

Discussion is starting over via Techmeme.

Lee Odden has an interview with MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer, where he asks questions about how he transitioned from Feedster to MyBlogLog and covers the growth of MyBlogLog.

In a related article, Jeremy Schoemaker at his Shoemoney blog posted a 10 Things I Wish MyBlogLog Would Do article. All of his requests would be useful add-ons to the program.

A newly published patent application from Yahoo, Using community annotations as anchortext, provides a hint at some of the research and work that Yahoo is doing to incorporate user created tags, annotations, bookmarks, and social profiles into the way that they index and organize information, and rank that information.

Danny asked me if I would mention a recent SEO by the Sea post here, where I went into some depth on the processes described in that document. It is at Social Trustrank and User Annotations as Anchor Text. One of the most interesting aspects the patent covers is how trustrank might benefit from interactions between Yahoo and users of Yahoo services. You’ve possibly heard of trustrank in conjunction with the paper Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (pdf).

Instead of just pointing at my post though, I thought it might be interesting to also point to some little cited and little discussed papers that also discuss user tagging, annotations, and how those might help strengthen the offerings from Yahoo (with a Google Base mention for good measure)…

Social Search

Raghu Ramakrishnan, who joined Yahoo this summer as Vice President and Research Fellow, provides a very detailed presentation on the subject in Community Systems: The World Online. It’s a long presentation, but is a great way to come up to speed with what Yahoo is doing in the area of social search. An extended abstract of the presentation gives a hint as to what is included:

A natural question is whether we can exploit shared community interactions to improve other Web activities, in particular, search. We call this social search, and there are broadly three ways to use social interactions to improve search: 1) Use shared annotations (tags, comments, ratings, etc.) as metadata to improve search result ranking; 2) Use shared activity profiles to connect users with a mutual interest in being connected, as an extension of search; and 3) Create communities of purpose that are empowered to collect and integrate repositories of data harvested by crawling the Web.

Social Metadata

I was able to locate some other documents that explore this area from Yahoo. One that comes very close to the processes described in the patent application is Towards the Semantic Web: Collaborative Tag Suggestions, and it shares a couple of authors with the patent filing. It goes into detail on some of the lessons that they’ve learned by looking at how people tagged pages on their My Web 2.0, and discusses steps that they will take to try to improve the service based upon that analysis.

The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, December 2006 Vol. 31 No. 4, has a Special Issue on Web-Scale Data, Systems, and Semantics (pdf), which includes a couple of interesting documents from Yahoo and Google. My link leads to the full issue, but I’ve also linked to the Google cache text copies of the documents if you would like to go directly to those:

• Content, Metadata, and Behavioral Information: Directions for Yahoo! Research
• Structured Data Meets the Web: A Few Observations

The Yahoo document focuses upon the overall efforts of the Yahoo Research group in the future, and allocates a very strong role to the use of social information into their plans for that future:

Today, however, the number of distinct users generating useful metadata is growing rapidly due to three factors. First, the emergence of simple Web authoring tools such as hosted blogging software makes it possible for authorship to migrate from the elite to a much larger base of online users motivated to express themselves. Second, the introduction of new models for explicit creation of metadata versus content, such as tagging and bookmarking (e.g., through del.icio.us), the creation of rich profiles (e.g., myspace.com), or even the creation and publishing of multimedia content (e.g., youtube.com) lowers the barrier from authorship to lighter-weight interactions like commenting on somebody else’s content. And finally, there are situations in which content consumption itself is a generator of useful metadata.

I thought it was worth pointing out the Google document in this Bulletin because of some of the insights that it provides to user interaction in the building of Google Base. In the creation of customized search engines through Google Base, it’s the creator of that search engine and chosen collaborators who decide upon what is important, and what should be annotated. They talk a little about these kind of annotations in comparing them to those from Flickr:

There is a third class of structured data on the web which is the result of a variety of annotation schemes. Annotation schemes enable users to add tags describing underlying content (e.g., photos) to enable better search over the content. The Flickr Service by Yahoo! is a prime example of an annotation service for photo collections. von Ahn [14] took this idea to the next level by showing how mass collaboration can be used to create highquality annotations of photos.

Research on Flickr

Speaking of Flickr, what kinds of things might Yahoo be learning from looking at the ways that people tag images? Inducing Ontology from Flickr Tags provides one look at some research being done on that subject. Here’s a snippet:

Based upon our experience and that of others (e.g., Naaman et al. [6]), we hypothesized that images will be annotated and most easily retrieved when emphasizing several key facets: place, activity and depictions. The Flickr community also seems to emphasize another facet that might best be described as emotion or response. In our results a large proportion of the shared vocabulary is tied to placenames, although we expect that model refinements will produce more of a balance with other facets.

One area that has to be of concern when user-based information is used in a service like Flickr is privacy. You may have heard of Yahoo’s Zonetag service, in which people can upload photos from camera phones, and have the locations of those images recorded based upon GPS or cell phone triangulation. A study that looked at privacy concerns of users of ZoneTag shows another aspect of the use of user created information: Privacy Decisions for Location-Tagged Media

Future Research

Yahoo research about how people interact with applications on the web is going far beyond counting and indexing tags and annotations, and trying to understand social networks though. This paper on how people interact with remixing media, and the decisions made in the creation of videos shows another area that they are exploring: Community Annotation and Remix: a Research Platform and Pilot Deployment.

The statement from Yahoo Developers Network’s Chad Dickerson about Yahoo’s acquisition of MyBlogLog, Bloggers unite! Yahoo! joins forces with MyBlogLog is in part an announcement of the acquisition, but it’s also a welcome from the Developer’s Network to the folks behind MyBlogLog. There are quite a few folks behind the scenes at Yahoo working on how to use social search in the services they provide.

To return to Raghu Ramakrishnan’s statement above, how will Yahoo “exploit shared community interactions to improve other Web activities?” MyBlogLog provides some opportunities at collecting community information that Yahoo didn’t have before. It will be interesting to see how they might use that information.

After several weeks of rumors, Yahoo has officially announced it has agreed to purchase the MyBlogLog service. I’ve used the service for several weeks on my personal blog Daggle and the Daily SearchCast and found it pretty compelling. I’ve just added it now to Search Engine Land. It allows you to easily let anyone join and see your "blog community." You’ll find some discussion of the sale via Techmeme here and here. Below, I’ll cover more on the basics of how it works from blog surfer and blog owner perspective.

MyBlogLog works by having you insert JavaScript tracking code on all your pages. That allows MyBlogLog to identify MyBlogLog members that come to your site. The members themselves are identified by cookies MyBlogLog leaves with them when they register with the service.

I’ll use myself as an example. I signed up back in November, giving me a profile page you’ll see here. That page lists My Communities, blogs that I say I’m a part of. By default, if I go to a blog that is running MyBlogLog code and view more than 10 pages, I’ll be made a member of that community automatically. At the moment, I’ve actually set this so I join communities manually.

Probably the coolest thing about MyBlogLog is that when you go to a blog running the code — and if you’re a member — then you’ll see yourself show up in the "widget" or member box that people typically run. I’ve just added the code to Search Engine Land, and here’s how it looks with us:

As a member, you can also claim your blog as an author. Visit my profile page, and you’ll see the four sites I’ve now claimed (and you can join those communities as well):

• The Ichthyosaurs Blog (yes, it’s mine — see here for more on that)
• Daggle
• Daily SearchCast
• Search Engine Land

Earlier I said that Daggle and Daily SearchCast were using the MyBlogLog code. I hadn’t put it up on Search Engine Land for a couple of reasons. First, putting the code up means that MyBlogLog will understand everything that’s going on within your web site. So if you don’t want them knowing your top pages, visitors and so on, don’t use the code. It’s not required to have a community. But without it, it’s harder to build that community. You certainly can’t display the faces of your members without it.

I’m not saying that MyBlogLog is doing anything bad with the stats. You can also read the privacy policy here. I’m just highlighting that signing up as community means you’re letting them see everything about your site. And signing up as a member means they’ll know every site you visit, if that site is using their tracking code.

Now that I’m sharing our stats publicly, such as with yesterday’s big report, I’m not so worried about MyBlogLog having more insight into the site. But the other downside is that rather than having a community with MyBlogLog’s branding, I wanted one with my own branding.

TechCrunch has this, as you can see here. Before we launched, I’d sent a message in November to MyBlogLog asking about doing the same. At the time, there was actually information on requesting cobranding communities like this. I never heard back, nor can I find this as being offered anymore. Maybe it was dropped or maybe they dropped the ball.

I’m still going to try and get the cobranding thing going, if that’s available. But in the meantime, I’ve added the MyBlogLog code to Search Engine Land. Becoming part of Yahoo is only going to raise the importance of being in MyBlogLog for any site owner.

Getting your blog going is easy. There’s an Add A Site page to use. As part of this, you can pick your own URL display name. IE, every community (unless cobranded) will have this URL:

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/YOURNAMEHERE

See that YOURNAMEHERE part? That’s replaced with whatever name you choose. This is one reason to sign-up now. Once someone uses that name, it’s gone. Get the name you want if only to ensure others can’t take it from you.

After you sign-up, you’ll be given the tracking code to install. Then it’s customization time. Find the community from your profile page, and you’ll see options to such as to show the faces next to comments for Typepad, Moveable Type or WordPress users. This is slick. Adding the code means that anyone signed up with MyBlogLog should have their faces show up next to their comments on our blog. I say should because for the sites I’ve registered, I’m told the service is "requested, awaiting admin’s action" with no guidance as whether that’s something MyBlogLog is supposed to be following up on or if I haven’t configured something correctly.

You also have the ability to update your site’s screenshot. I was disappointed at first that MyBlogLog just didn’t automatically pick these up the way it should have done when I enrolled three of my sites months ago. I had to manually make a screenshot and upload it.

At that time, Search Engine Land had its prelaunch design. The screenshot has stayed that way since we changed. That required me to go in an manually update once again today. Far better if the service just dynamically kept track of your home page and updated it automatically. Of course, one advantage is that you can customize your home page look for the screenshot better than with an automated snapshot.

You’ll also see a Get Widgets option for each of your sites. This allows you to customize the look of the MyBlogLog box that goes on your pages by color, number of readers displayed and so on. If you understand some coding, you can do even further customization.

That’s the basic overview. I haven’t gotten into the stats that the service can provide, simply because I haven’t played with them much. I already have a stats solution, so they haven’t been that much of interest. Looking now, it’s pretty neat that I can see other sites that my members are visiting, like this:

There’s also the ability to log what people are clicking on. Do that, and you can show the world how popular any of your links are. I’ve switched this on for the next day or so, just to play with it more.

Hey — don’t forget, join the Search Engine Land community!