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We need open data for blog communities

19.Jul.2007

Everyone knows MyBlogLog, and if you don’t you just ain’t reading enough blogs. They offer a very interesting service, the ability to track and identify your blog visitors. Although it also shows you some website stats, the feature that made everybody start using it was the fact that now, some of those numbers you see on your favorite statistics service, start to have real faces. Now you can identify a bigger portion of your audience, the ones that usually don’t leave comments. The ability to identify your blog readers enables you to create a community for your blog, another service provided by MyBlogLog.

There are several other similar services and I’m sure you can easily find more. The reason for MyBlogLog popularity is mainly for being the pioneer on this kind of services and being able to quickly gather a large number of users, an essential characteristic.

Photo by Carla216 at Flickr.

I also have the MyBlogLog script installed on this blog, not the widget though, but I feel that all the possibilities the service could offer me are very restricted. Besides the need to upgrade to a fee-based account to get full stats, I can’t really do much with my community. What if I wanted to get a full list of my visitors, track the ones which are more loyal and just ask for their feedback or offer them the limited invites I got the other day. And identifying readers could also enable me to offer a better service for them on my blog. Warn them about the new posts they haven’t read yet, tell them that I have already replied to their comment. Even the widgets offered by the above mentioned services are somewhat limited.

You would have an infinite number of possibilities to offer a better experience, if only the information about your blog readers was open. Unfortunately, all of the platforms I stumbled upon we’re very limited (if not totally restricted) when it came to open your data. In my opinion, the first application that could offer something as simples as an API for my blog readers basic data, has a big chance of taking over as the most used (and useful) blogger tool. Bloggers could start knowing better their audience and, specially, the users could have a significant boost on their reading experience.

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3 Comments

Fortunatly the MBL code is clean and easy to parse. I agree APIs are the best way to go. When there is no API I write my own. Nice blog. I like the clean design. BeachBum

beachbum / 19.Jul.2007 at 02:15am

Thanks for the compliment.

I must say I never tried checking out their code and that shouldn't be the way to go. Anyway, is there a place where we can see your API for MBL?