Goodbye MyBlogLog, RIP

Since 2006 I've been using a service called MyBlogLog to give me some insights into the popular articles on this Blog, and where visitors to the Blog came from.

Well I don't have to any more as today I received an email notification from Yahoo that Yahoo are sunsetting (aka terminating) the MyBlogLog service on 24th May 2011.

If your interested there's more details on MyBlogLog on the eponymous Wikipedia but in a nutshell MBL enables you to track who is visiting your blog, how they reached your blog, what they looked at, and form a community with them. The tracking is similar to the information that Google Analytics gives you except I personally thought it was better because the reports gave details of not just what site the visitor came from but also what keywords they used. So for instance yesterday's information was that I had visitors from:

Google Search: channel 4 documentary french gite
Google Search: what is nippi

http://us2.startpage-proxy.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&cat=pics&c=pf&q=kids%20playing&h=393&w=600&th=196&tw=300&fn=pool_L.jpg
http://www.google.es/imgres?imgurl=http://www.giteinbrittany.com/images/pool_l.jpg
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3339/4594389461_5bd1010156.jpg

So the last three are people who viewed various photos from search engines or a proxy site, but the first two show that visitors came with relevant searches to look at my review to look at the review of A Place In France - Indian Summer by Nigel Farrell and Nippi Singh.

The community side of MBL probably never reached critical mass, you can subscribe to your "favourite blogs", send messages to the Blog author and others that like your blog, and although there are now 45,000 blogs on BML but much of this is similar and of course far less popular than "like it" widgets from Twitter, Facebook and the other social media sites, the new darlings of the internet world.

Anyway, after spending $10m dollars in 2007 Yahoo has decided that it is not part of its "core strategy" and is killing it off in May.

BML had either a paid model or a free model, I used the free model so was able to view reports of my Blog visitors for just the last 7 days, so since 2006 I have been laboriously copy and pasting the reports into a massive Excel spreadsheet every week or so so I can see how the Blog is doing. At least I will be saved the task of doing that from May, but once MBL goes I'll try to produce some stats on what's been the most interesting articles - any bets as to what that might be?