Blog Toys

I’ve been playing with a few “blog toys” yesterday and today. Haven’t made my mind up about any of them yet… but they’re interesting in various ways.

First off, I’ve added a little badge for whos.amung.us at the bottom of every page. This is an little image that shows, in real time, how many folks are on the blog (works with a website too). Click it and you’ll see what pages folks are looking at.

And that’s about all it does. Kind of fun though.  Trying to decide if I should have privacy concerns, but haven’t actually even looked at the cookie yet.

My only current concern is for their server load. If they get slow, I’ll get slow loading my own pages and this’ll become annoying.

Speaking of server load slowing me down, I had removed the MyBlogLog stuff from the side bar for a few days earlier this week. I felt it was a bit too sluggish. Added it back this afternoon and things seem fine for the moment. As before, it is only on the main page.

I have mixed feelings after using MyBlogLog for the past few months. It is fun to see new faces pop up and by clicking the icons of readers, I’ve discovered some great blogs. I enjoy that aspect of it a lot.  On the other side though, this whole community thing leaves me in the dark. What’s the purpose or point? I join a community and … what? I get to read a few disjointed conversations in the sidebar?

Yeah, disjointed — having to click between two “myblogloggers” to see both sides of a convo is just silly. Let’s get some threading going on here! Or make this community stuff act more like a forum. There’s gotta be a way for this to provide more value, eh?

Next up is the Sphere Related Comments plugin that you’ll see on each individual article page. Over on the right sidebar with all the other “meta” / sharing / social stuff. In theory, this uses the power of Sphere to find other articles that might be related to the one you’re reading. Sometimes it works well, sometimes the results are puzzling at best. Sphere itself is pretty cool though, so I’ll keep this around for a bit.

Right below that, in the same sidebar, is another new gadget. This one is from Technorati and attempts to show if any other blogs have linked to the current article (called “blog reactions”). In my active fantasy world, I’ll see more of these over time. For now, not too active. Found it on the Technorati Tools page.

I’m open to feedback on any of these.  Thoughts, questions or concerns?  Lay ‘em on me.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Sphere – Blog Searching
2. Playing with MyBlogLog
3. Blog Housekeeping
4. Caching the Blog
5. That nofollow Thing