MyBlogLog, fake social proof?
February 3rd, 2008 by Dave. 3 Comments »
MyBlogLog (acquired for $10m about a year ago by Yahoo!) is a nice idea. You include a small line of code on your site & it displays who your readers are. I won’t go into the stats you can collect from from doing something like that, but needless to say you can get a lot of information. It’s valuable information as well.
To your website visitors it provides social proof; that they are in the right place, that your content is worth reading, that their friends read your site. For you it provides reputation by association. But, it’s a lie.
- Visiting a site doesn’t make me a reader
- I don’t consider myself to be associated to someone because I read their blog
- By visiting a site, I don’t endorse it, or it’s content.
It’s not social proof, but it’s cleverly disguised as social proof. What’s more, I think people trust it as social proof.
p.s. screenshot of MyBlogLog’s widget nicked from Will McInnes’s blog. Few familiar faces in there; Nic Brisbourne, Ivan Pope to name a few. See, social proof?
p.p.s. with people moving from visiting sites to feed readers how valuable is it really? Google saw that, and with Google Reader & Feedburner need I say more…
p.p.p.s. without manually removing cookies from your browser there is no way to stop it tracking you (logging out won’t work)