Yahoo Snaps Up Mybloglog.com – By Forbes.com CES Blog

Yahoo Inc. is making notoriety a mouse click away.The Internet portal has purchased Mybloglog.com, an Orlando, Fla.-based website that enables readers of web pages to leave information about themselves, building a social network among fans of such things as News Corp’s MySpace pages, commercial web publications, or personal weblogs, or blogs. Mybloglog also looks at reader behavior inside blogs, like what is being read and where readers go next, delivering information it can sell to web advertisers.

Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

“This closes the loop between readers and publishers,” he said. “Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It’s the power of implicit networking.”

Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.

The social network is the more valuable thing for future growth, according to both companies. “The biggest thing in blog search is ego search – my name, the web sites I love,” says Rafer, who will work for Horowitz, promoting his service to Yahoo’s many properties. “People search Google and Wikipedia for information; with blogs, people look for cool things and serendipity.” And, by watching what readers look at, and learning overall behaviors, companies like his can sell to advertisers information about what products should be advertised where.

That information will become even more valuable, of course, if Yahoo can grow the business to a significant percentage of its hundreds of millions of monthly users, and add to the functions. “I have gigantic plans for this project,” said Horowitz. “This is a playground where readers can talk to each other…think about community photos, community answers, Yahoo groups or meeting services.”

One thing Yahoo will not do, he added, is actively market the site with Web advertising. “The thing is growing like a weed in the viral pattern you want,” Horowitz said. In other words, Web advertising is for some products, and selling it is for others. — Quentin Hardy

Story was found at: http://blogs.forbes.com/forbespecial/2007/01/yahoo_snaps_up_.html