Stealing MyBlogLog Contacts – Are You Guilty Of It?

MyBlogLog is a widely used social networking service found on blogs all over the internet. It displays the latest visitors to your site in a widget mostly found in sidebars and footers. Recently I received an e-mail from someone by the name of Matt which read the following:

Hi Chris,

Nice blog you have here. I was wondering if you’d mind if I added all the recent visitors to your blog on to MyBlogLog contact list? I’m trying to build my list and this is the easiest way to do it.

Matt

My response in a nutshell, “Sure, go ahead.” Any way you can build your social contact list is a plus. I find myself guilty of the same thing. Most blogs I visit I click on those little icons and proceed to add, add and add some more. How do you think I got to over 600 contacts in 3 months?

Some would argue that it’s stealing traffic away from others, especially the owner of the site you’re adding contacts from. I’ve seen some bloggers tweak their MyBlogLog widgets to link to the actual site of the visitor, not their profile. John Chow did this tweak recently for his comment pages. John made the change to better serve his visitors though, not to protect himself from having his commentators added to other people’s lists.

I say all is fair game.

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