Ian Kennedy works at Yahoo as a Product Manager for MyBlogLog. In the e-interview below, he talks about how nonprofits can use MyBlogLog to build community on their blog or web site, what changes and additions Yahoo has made to MyBlogLog since they bought it in January, and what new features and tools are in the works. You can check out his personal blog at everwas.com.

1. What can a nonprofit do with MyBlogLog?

MyBlogLog is a simple way to add community to any web site. With a single line of javascript added to the HTML of your website, any visitors to your site that has registered with MyBlogLog will automatically mark their visit on the Recent Reader widget showing their userpic on top. For an example of the Recent Reader widget in action, take a look at the sidebar on Britt's blog, - the most recent visitors are there within the widget, with the most recent reader's photo up on top.

While MyBlogLog started as a tool for blogs, the name is a bit of a misnomer - the widget can be placed on any web page, not just blogs. For an example of the Recent Reader running on a more traditional web site, see Yahoo's People of the Web.

2. How can MyBlogLog help a nonprofit build an online community? Can you give a few MyBlogLog community building tips?

Because visitors to your site are updating it with their userpic, you're providing a quick and easy way for your readers to connect with each other. Traditional methods for readers of a site to interact with each other required registration (as with a forum), or leaving a comment on a blog post.

The MyBlogLog Recent Reader widget requires no interaction, just viewing a page in your browser is all that's needed. MyBlogLog is for the other 99% of your readership that does not take the time to register or comment. MyBlogLog has a concept of "communities" which represent the individual websites which users can "join." By joining your community on MyBlogLog, users can list themselves on your community page and learn more about each other. Take a look at the listing for the Non-Profit Tech Blog - you can learn more about the site, the person who writes it, and the people that read it, just by clicking around on the faces you see there.

As a site owner registered for MyBlogLog, you can represent your site as you surf the web. Because the MyBlogLog cookie is placed on your PC once you login to MyBlogLog, every site you subsequently visit that features the MyBlogLog widget will show your face as a Recent Reader. As you visit other sites, your visit will prompt site owners, and other readers, to click on your userpic and learn more about you, which will drive people to visit your site. We also provide lightweight messaging features so you can leave messages on people's profiles. When people stop by your site that seem interesting to you, let them know that you appreciate their visit. Small gestures like this go a long way towards building a faithful community of readers that will continue to come back again and again.

3. What kind of statistics can a nonprofit see from using MyBlogLog? How is it different than other stat counters?

While the most visible feature of MyBlogLog is the Recent Reader widget, the service started out as a simple stats package. While it's not meant to replace more full-service stats packages, it's a great supplement. MyBlogLog provides a basic dashboard showing you where people came from, what they looked at, and where they went next. It's a great, lightweight stats package that gives you a quick snapshot of what's happening on your site. If you sign up for the premium service ($3/month or $25/year per site) you get intra-day stats as well.

4. How can MyBlogLog members find nonprofits that are using MyBlogLog?

The MyBlogLog site has a search box that searches the community of MyBlogLog sites registered with us. Search on keywords to find sites that match that description and you'll get a list of results including not only sites, but also members that match. MyBlogLog also has a simple tag search that looks across tags added by our community. To search non-profit members and sites; for example, try mybloglog.com/buzz/tags/nonprofit - these are tags that have been applied by the MyBlogLog members, so there is a high probability of a match. [Britt's note: Check out mybloglog.com/buzz/tags/nptech too]

5. Can you give an example of a nonprofit that is using MyBlogLog successfully?

Unfortunately, not within the non-profit sector (if you're out there, let me know!). To give you an idea of things that I've seen some sites do is use the Recent Reader widget as a way to highlight random members from their community. For example, there's one fellow, who writes mini-reviews about the most recent 10 readers that visit his site on Sunday in a weekly contest he calls MyBlogLog Sunday. Another person cut out all the userpics of members of his community and posted a video of a lottery drawing he held on YouTube.

6. If a nonprofit wanted to set up MyBlogLog on their site today, how do they do it? How much time would it take to set up and maintain?

If you've ever added a widget to your site's sidebar, then adding MyBlogLog shouldn't take longer than a few minutes. We have a number of tutorials on the site that walk you through adding the Recent Reader widget to most of the popular blog platforms.

7. What changes and additions has Yahoo made to MyBlogLog since they bought it in January?

Most of the work has been behind the scenes. We've upgraded all our servers and are now running simultaneously across two shiny new Yahoo server farms, one on the East Coast of the United States and another on the West. We have also integrated the MyBlogLog membership and accounts with the Yahoo ID and sign-on. This will make it easier to enable Yahoo users to take advantage of MyBlogLog and for MyBlogLog-enabled sites to benefit from visits from registered Yahoo users.

8. What has been the greatest challenge of the transition?

The biggest challenge has been moving from a small, rapidly evolving startup to being part of a much larger company. Yahoo is more structured in its rollout procedures so the team has had to adjust the way they refresh the site and enable new features or hardware. This early learning curve is mostly over though and Yahoo understands well that the social media space is rapidly evolving so it's important to evolve new features and elicit feedback as the landscape changes.

9. What are some new MyBlogLog features and tools in the works?

The team is very interested in the concept of portable social networks. That is to say, a group of contacts, and aspects of that group that you can pick up and take with you from one site to the next. As a user of MyBlogLog, you create associations with sites and other members. Each of these have tags associated with them, as well as statistical information about the most popular post on a site, or favorite sites that your contacts visit. This information can be used in interesting ways to act as a filter on what you see across the web and to suggest sites that you may not know about that have a strong corellation to your interests.

A second batch of features we are thinking about have to do with the fact that we now integrated with the Yahoo infrastructure which allows us to more rapidly take advantage of all the cool services a platform like Yahoo makes available.

10. Is there anything else you want Net2 Blog readers to know about MyBlogLog?

MyBlogLog also features a Services tab on each member profile. Here you can add pointers to your other profiles on the social web such as your del.ici.ous, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm or YouTube ID (just to name a few). We recently added a feature that allows you to embed links to each of these services in your email signature, which is a great way to let the people you communicate with know about other social media services you use to get the word out.

We are also in the final stages of writing an API that will allow sites, and other third parties, to deeply integrate the MyBlogLog services into their own look and feel. Subscribe to the MyBlogLog blog and look for a posting there.