Just when MyBlogLog plugs the hole on one exploit, Jeremy Schoemaker finds another one.
Want to browse other blogs as Scott Rafer, Jason Calacanis or Jeremy Zawodney? Head over to Shoemoney to learn how, before MBL makes the fix.
On one hand it’s funny, on the other hand it’s somewhat concerning that MBL has so many “easter egg” vulnerabilities.
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I feel bad for the guys at MyBlogLog. Ever since being acquired by Yahoo, they’ve not exactly had a comfy ride. Things escalated this weekend, with reports that spammers had found an exploit that allowed them to add themselves as “co-authors” on as many communities as they wished.
Saturday evening, a member discovered an exploit where you could send someone a request to join their community as a co-author and then automatically approve the request.  In other words, someone (dare I call them a jackass) could force you to be a co-author of their community.  I have no idea why they would do this, other than a negligible bump in marketing, but who ever said jackasses made sense?

To their credit, they’ve reacted well and today announced new steps to improve the community and hopefully reduce the amount of spam

** Congratulations to Rhea, who was chosen at random to win her choice of either a Zune or iPod. Rhea, please email me for details on your prize and thanks to all that entered! **
…going to be announced at 4pm EDT today.
We’ve already picked our random winner and I’ll post that person’s name and MyBlogLog profile on this post at 4pm today.

Time is running out to join our MyBlogLog community and be entered to win a free iPod or Zune mp3 player.
Sometime before Feb 16th - which means this week - I’ll randomly select one lucky member of the Marketing Pilgrim MyBlogLog community to win the prize.
And, if you’ve already blogged this contest, you win an additional prize.
Full details here.

MyBlogLog is certainly the talk of the blogosphere these days. Readers know that I’m a big fan of the service - even though I can’t wait for their move to faster servers - and the company continues to add new users every day.
Lee Odden had a chance to ask Scott Rafer a few questions. Not too much info - Scott’s a busy man - but we do learn that they have over 50k users and growing by 2% each day.
Meanwhile, Shoemoney, has a list of ten features he’d like to see added to the service

Despite all of the grief that came my way yesterday, the MyBlogLog contest is still alive and well.
All you need to do is join our MyBlogLog community and you’ll automatically be entered to win a Microsoft Zune - or if you hate the idea of owning anything MSFT, we’ll send you an iPod instead

Jeremy’s decided that he needs to suggest to his readers that I am spamming MyBlogLog. Yep, Jeremy believes that he is the guardian of all that Yahoo decides to buy and he should make wild claims - maybe he’s just pissed because we discovered the spammy tactics Yahoo was employing.
Jeremy obviously has no idea of the amount of spam that is already going on at MyBlogLog - have you read the comments and messages people leave each other Jeremy? Here I am, encouraging people to join the Marketing Pilgrim MyBlogLog community - something I did before it took off and before Yahoo acquired it - and he accuses me of spamming

You may have noticed that I have again removed the MyBlogLog widget.
Over the weekend, I noticed - as did others - that MP was taking far too long to load. After a quick analysis using the nifty OctaGate SiteTimer, I managed to isolate the offending item. The MyBlogLog widget.
Here’s a snapshot showing the widget taking almost six seconds to load.

I email the MyBlogLog team to see if a server had gone down again, but have not heard back as of yet

Just an FYI, the MyBlogLog widget is not loading well today and is causing extremely slow page load times. I’ve removed it from the page, until they fix the issue.
If anyone from MBL or Yahoo wants to leave a comment once it’s fixed, I’ll gladly add it back.
In the meantime, anyone else noticed the slowdown today?
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Read/WriteWeb has a pretty cool summary of all the acquisitions made by Yahoo since around 2005. I’d forgotten one or two, but the list is pretty impressive. What’s even more impressive is how cheaply Yahoo managed to acquire a lot of these companies.
While Google’s out spending $1.6 billion for video technology that it already had in Google Video, Yahoo’s put together an impressive list of Web 2.0 technologies for what appears to be less than $100 million.

By now you’ll know of the great search marketing tools you can get when you sign up for SoloSEO (disc). They’ve just announced a set of free tools that will help you get the most out of the MyBlogLog community.
“The Missing MyBlogLog Tools” include:
Compare Blog Visitors
Compare Your Contacts
Compare Community Members
There’s a few more and each are worthy of MyBlogLog providing themselves

It appears there is one downside to having the MyBlogLog profile script on your blog and SoloSEO’s Michael Jensen has discovered it. (disc)
He used automatic refresh on Opera, a fake MyBlogLog account and an experiment on hundreds of blogs, including TechCrunch. He discovered that it’s easy to display any profile continually on blogs using the MyBlogLog script and generate lots of free traffic.
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Over at Search Engine Journal, Loren provides his thoughts on why it was a good move for Yahoo to acquire MyBlogLog and offers some suggestions on how the blogging community will help Yahoo, including:
Out of all the Yahoo properties which I think will benefit from the MyBlogLog acquisition, I feel that YPN has the most to gain…In MyBlogLog, YPN now as the perfect tools to connect with these bloggers and judge the quality of blogs based upon the readers of the blogs and their audience.

I agree, Yahoo’s acquisition was smart

It appears Marketing Pilgrim and Yahoo are on the same page…we both think MyBlogLog is a pretty cool company!
The social network for bloggers and blog readers has seen great growth in the past few months with lots of blogs installing their tracking code and building their MyBlogLog community. Once again proving it’s in touch with social media, Yahoo has snapped up the company for a reported $10-12 million.
Judging by the official MyBlogLog blog, the guys appear to be excited about the acquisition and explain what backing from Yahoo will mean to them.
Yahoo! is going to put loads of resources into MyBlogLog and help us roll out a ton of new features.  Plus, we’re moving to their infrastructure, which should help with those occasional slowdowns.

And Mashable explains Yahoo’s strategy for keeping MyBlogLog a separate entity while still mashing it up with other Yahoo web properties.
Bradley Horowitz, VP of product strategy at Yahoo, said that MyBlogLog would remain a separate entity (much like their other social acquisitions) , but you’ll be able to register with your Yahoo ID

After I announced I’d be giving away a free Zune MP3 player to one lucky member of Marketing Pilgrim’s MyBlogLog community, Shoemoney decided he’d throw down the gauntlet.
His challenge? That sex still sells and people who join MyBlogLog are essentially only one step above MySpace users (my words, not his), and would rather see a photo of an attractive girl in a tight top, than win a Zune.
It’s an interesting challenge, and while I’m more interested in building community members than beating Jeremy, it will be fun to see who “wins” this social experiment.
So, in the meantime, I’ll ask you

So, last month we gave away an iPod just for reading our RSS feed. The lucky winner simply spotted a secret message and took the prize. This contest is even easier!
Step 1 - Join Marketing Pilgrim’s MyBlogLog community.
Step 2 - Er…that’s it. We’ll pick one random member sometime before Feb 16th.
Easy enough? All we want you to do is join our MyBlogLog community and you’ll be entered to win a “shiny” (that’s for you Lisa!) new Microsoft