Mybloglog.com has been getting quite a bit of attention, particularly by several noted A-list bloggers (AVC, Read/Write, Techcrunch, Calacanis, and others). With all of that exposure, membership has rising (most likely fairly dramatically).

The concept is terrific. I’ve had it up on my blog since the beginning. I like to see who is looking at my blog, who is commenting (whenever that starts), and the service gives me a chance to explore other blogs, mostly by people that I ultimately find interesting to read. Most of this is free. The freemium model at its finest. I can also see limited stats about where people came from, what they clicked on, and what outgoing links they looked at. Unfortunately, after the trial period, you have to pony up $3 to see real-time stats, otherwise, you are relegated to looking at yesterday’s results. Which is strange, since there are countless other free services that can provide you the same statistics in real-time. It would be nice if they sought an alternate strategy to make money and gave me back the real-time stats

With the influx of new signups from all this exposure, comes the inevitable (and there was some of it before this coverage hit): spam. That’s right, spammers will start rolling in, joining communities, posting comments, trying to add in links to profiles, making a mess of the whole thing. How mybloglog.com responds will be interesting to follow.

The growing pains are about to begin. Figuring out where to place advertising (I do not think this freemium model is going to hold water) will be a challenge. More importantly, however, is how to integrate value-added advertising, which I think can happen. I would consider allowing a small advert to be a part of the mybloglog widget on my blog in exchange for getting the real-time stats back.

Oh the irony: just received an email from mybloglog.com letting me know that they’ve automatically added me to a community. They claim:

Part of what makes MyBlogLog so special is our ability to automatically add you to communities in which you have shown a repeated interest.

Funny, I never recall visiting the site, nor that community that they just added me to. That is like Netflix adding movies to the top of my queue based on other movies that I watched or looked at, thinking I liked it. Looks like the spam has already started. The community I was just automatically added to is called “quick online tips”. Great, thank you and no thanks. I also do not see anywhere in the preferences how I can “unsubscribe” from this auto-community-joining feature.

UPDATE: Thank you Eric and Rafer for looking into the above. I have serious egg on my face, as I did in fact visit the site above during my travels around the net. I thoroughly enjoy the service and am happy that they took my claim (even though it turned out that I am an idiot here) seriously and followed up. Thanks guys.

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