Matt Keegan and others have written recently about discontinuing use of MyBlogLog since Yahoo has taken over and made it more intrusive in terms of privacy. I can completely understand this. It’s alarming how much information all these companies have on us and they want to have more. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft would love to have your complete life history, including medical, financial, and any other private details they could gather. This practice may not stem from any evil intent, but it’s scary as hell, nonetheless.

The social networks are probably not the biggest threat to your own privacy, but they do present a threat against an even more prescious asset: your time. I began this post by asking how much time you spent on various social networks today. I suspect there will be a variety of answers ranging from none to a considerable amount of time. This cost of participating in social networks is what concerns me.

After being a newbie blogger for a while, I realized that I needed to do more marketing in order to get my name out there. I needed to expose my blog and my writing to more people so that I could get more traffic and links to my blog. Social networks presented a perfect way to do that. Participating in these kinds of communities offered a built-in way of advertising. All I had to do was put in some effort… and time.

It turns out that keeping up with the social networking began to take up more and more time that could have been spent in creating more and better content. I think the Pareto Principle comes into play with this, too. In fact, it’s probably significantly less than 20% of the time spent social networking that provides 80% of the results.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Being a part of these social networks has helped increase the popularity of FreshBlogger. It’s also helped me to get to know and become friends with a lot of interesting people. At some point, though, the time spent on these networks has to be seriously questioned.

The Law of Diminishing Returns does seem to come into play here, too. If fifteen or twenty minutes a day social networking accomplishes your networking goals, two more hours of time spent doesn’t necessarily advance those goals much further. Actually, I think it helps to contribute to the phenomenon of social networking overload.

After spending a lot of time on MyBlogLog, I eventually stopped going there every day. It was simply taking me too much time and energy to read the comments and check out the blogs of new visitors. I’m sure I’m missing out on some cool stuff, but I simply don’t have enough time to keep up with it anymore.

I can’t be the only one to be experiencing this. Most bloggers also have day jobs, families, and many other priorities in their lives that demand a portion of their time and energy. Social networking takes a bite out of those important resources and the returns tend to be less and less over time. If you’ve been experiencing social networking overload, leave a comment and let us know about it. If you disagree vehemently, we’d like to hear from you, too.

Some may see this as somewhat of an extreme reaction, but if you’re a member of a number of communities on MyBlogLog, then you may be receiving quite a few of these community messages. I’m currently a member of 500 communities on MyBlogLog and while I haven’t exactly been deluged by community messages, I’ve received enough of them to become annoyed.

Andy views these messages as spam. I’m not sure I would go as far as that, as we have joined these communities voluntarily. At the same time, though, we joined these communities without giving assent to receiving a bunch of mass mailings. Some of these mass mailings definitely have a spammy flavor.

So, what’s the solution? Clearly, the best way for MyBlogLog to put out the immediate fires is to allow users to opt out of receiving community messages. Currently, you can only opt out of all email notifications which also includes those that are sent when personal messages are received. This isn’t ideal because those personal messages are typical a much higher priority for you than the community messages.

MyBlogLog seems to be pretty responsive to their user’s input and Andy is a great advocate of social networking sites, especially MyBlogLog. Based on comments on his blog, I know they read his posts. Hopefully, they’ll deal with this issue quickly and continue making MyBlogLog one of the best social networks on the net. Until then, I would caution users to be very judicious about sending community messages.

Some notable points he makes are that he believes it does encourage new readers to subscribe, that it also may influence advertisers who may otherwise see only partial statistics, it also may draw subscribers to link to your blog, and that it tends to increase the sense of your blog’s authority. All of these make a lot of sense to me. His last point seems to be that chicks may dig it. I won’t even attempt to argue with this; everyone knows that bloggers attract the hot females.

There is a discussion of the effect of MyBlogLog on things, too. I’ve found that being a member of MyBlogLog has increased my traffic somewhat and seems to also have increased the number of subscribers here at FreshBlogger. It’s definitely been a positive for this blog so far.

Andy also has included a top 10 list of how to increase your number of subscribers. Some of these may be somewhat difficult for most of us, but a few are definitely within reach. Writing good, useful content will always be the number one thing with marketing that content as a strong number two.

I have no doubt that the number of subscribers to your RSS feed is very important, but it may not be the most important thing to advertisers as Andy points out. A highly targeted niche with a small number of subscribers may be considered of even more value to a potential advertiser. Either way, check out Andy’s article and don’t forget to read the comments, too.

What caught my eye on my first visit was his article about marketing your blog using MyBlogLog. This is a topic I’ve been interested in since I started hearing about MyBlogLog and finally decided to sign up. There are three tips listed in this article and I’d like to add my commentary to each one:

1. Add 15 Communities a day.

This isn’t a bad idea. The more communities you’re a member of, the more users have a chance to see your avatar and possibly click on it. This brings up the question of whether to have a flashy MyBlogLog avatar that will draw users to click it or just a picture of yourself. I’ve chosen a picture of myself at this point, but I wonder if it’s scaring off potential readers…

2. Add 15 Contacts a day.

This one isn’t a bad idea, either, but it’s one that I haven’t done myself. I’ve added some contacts, but they’re mostly people I’ve had some contact with before. Some of my contacts are people who added me as a contact and I reciprocated after checking out their sites. I’m not sure what the etiquette is or should be for adding contacts on MyBlogLog. Any ideas?

3. Warning: this is more gray-hat than the above two. Comment on a MyBlogLog users blog and then repeatedly click on the link that goes to your profile (from the comment).

I don’t really care for this type of approach. Although, I’m not sure there’s ethically anything wrong with doing this, it does seem to be a little shady. When lots of users begin doing things like this to artificially inflate their numbers, the community will necessarily have to react and implement some sort of stricter controls. My recommendation is to avoid this tactic.

All in all, I’m curious as to how Broc’s tactics will work out. His next post is about emailing other bloggers to introduce his blog. In the post he links to 30 different bloggers whom he’s emailed and mine is one of those linked. I can’t help but be flattered to be included in the ranks with CopyBlogger, ShoeMoney, and ProBlogger, among others.

This tactic is actually a pretty good one as long as it’s done right. Broc’s email was brief and polite and didn’t include a hard sell. I get emails like this fairly regularly and I try to check all of them out. In this case I was struck by the newness of the blog and all the work he is doing to promote it. I’m going to be watching this one to see how things develop.