Posted by Fox on July 23, 2007 at 8:33 PM

MyBlogLog.com is a social network, and a good one IMHO (I'm ipodder on MyBlogLog). Aside from the social networking aspect of the service, the free widgets that they provide for my blog is invaluable. With just a small piece of code inserted in to my blog templates I get 2 really useful tools, and 2 that are not so useful.

Really useful are the tracking of my blog stats, and the snazzy display of recent visitors to the blog. Not so useful to a commercial blogger is the displaying of the 5 most popular outbound links (excluding Google Adsense), and the dynamic ranking of each out bound link.

As a commercial blogger, I want people to click my Google Adsense links, it's one of the ways I generate revenue to pay the bills. What I DON'T want to do is promote a list of the top 5 most popular NON-REVENUE generating links on my blog. That's not going to bring home the bacon now is it?

I did submit the suggestion a few months ago, that they provide a version that listed the top 5 most popular pages on my blog, but I guess it got lost in their inbox. Never mind though, bumpzee.com (a fast growing competitor of MyBlogLog) now offers tTHAT widget. You snooze, you lose boys!

Tracking your Blog Stats

Once installed, the free widget tracks 5 bits of REALLY useful data:

Total number of page views.
Total Number of readers.
Top 10 Most popular pages.
Top 10 most popular reffering pages (where readers came from).
Top 10 most popular out-bound links (where readers went).

The free version of MyBlogLog provides the data one day in arrears. That's to say that you don't get real-time stat tracking. For example. I can't see todays stats until tomorrow. They save the real time stats tracking for those willing to upgrade to a premium account for $25. Fair enough.

Displaying recent visitors to your blog

Though I don't use this feature on all of my blogs, it is a great way to give new visitors to your blog the impression that it's a popular blog, or if your blog is genuinely popular... just how popular it is.

You can see this in action on the front page of thumblounge.com

You can edit the colours, choose between two avatar sizes and specific how many reader avatars should be shown.

Dynamic Ranking of Outbound Links

This feature shows the popularity of an outbound link when users 'mouse-over' it. It's difficult to demonstrate it here because I'd have to turn in on across the whole site, and frankly I think its a waste of time, for both me and my readers.

Promoting the Top 5 Most Popular Links on Your Blog.

This is the only place I'll use this MyBlogLog widget, just to demostrate how it works. Worth noting that while the free version will show yesterdays Top 5 outbound links, the pro version shows the current top 5 (updated hourly).

Related : Tops Tips on using MyBlogLog