I joined MyBlogLog on June 2007. In my early joining days I enjoyed some new friends and tried to find communities that would suit my passions. Then years gone by...I don't look in MyBlogLog anymore. Why should I care about it? Actually I'm not really aware of what was happening in those big corporations. I was disappointed when Yahoo! Photos was terminated. I didn't have time to gather back all my pictures, so I just let it go... Perhaps photos are different with blogs. If we don't trust that a cyber photo album will last, we might have kept another back-up file. In the memory of my photos I agree to a point raised in the letter "The Power of Bloggers": "The closure of MyBlogLog represents a lack of respect to bloggers who have built tens of thousands of communities on the network and spent countless hours adding MyBlogLog widgets to their blogs."
MyBlogLog is a bit different with photo sharing. It is more into building a network, or a community within our passions. Topics can help us to look into writings that were written by others who share the same or similar passion to us. I always think that MyBlogLog is useful, yet it wasn't really working for me. Why? Because I didn't really know how to optimized its function. Perhaps it's true that Yahoo! abandones MyBlogLog. If Yahoo! gave me more information on how to optimize MyBlogLog's home, I'm sure it's going to be something that I'll really miss.
I can't (or I wouldn't) think about loosing the content of my blogs, but I didn't have time to make a back-up. Yet, creating a good community with inspirational conversations would be a greater loss than loosing a blog. Sometimes I knew people only through their blogs. Loosing a door into their blogs is like loosing your cell phone with all those telephone numbers and no back up list.
I like BloggersUnite because it gave me a chance to share ideas with friends all over the world. Uniting our voices can make a big difference. Voices from the social media are now taken into account. At least, it gave us a chance to have some point of views. One topic can be described from different way of seeing problems, and that would really be enriching our minds.
I don't really know what is BlogCatalog, but it seems to give you doors of topics in which you can find popular blogs. If you don't have lots of time, then it would save your browsing time.
Some of my friends who wrote for OhmyNews International (OMNI) missed the old site. The conversations that came out of it were worth the time spent on it. Off course there was always the plus and minus in a system, but people need a place to come and meet and have a conversation. A site like OMNI gave us a place to look for credible news. It's true that citizen journalism websites can't guarantee the credibility of their writers, but experienced editors or administrators can be a big help. Not to mention the input from loyal readers. (A communcation like this is needed.)
So, back to the main issue...is MyBlogLog worth saving? Should we stop Yahoo! from shutting down MyBlogLog? I think we should give it a try! We do need to build a better blogger community. The world become more global, issues are now mixed between local and global. One local problem can affect others as well, and it can be snowballing into a global issue. So, why don't we try to give MyBlogLog, together with BlogCatalog and BloggersUnite, a chance to give us a better door to communicate?
