Image via CrunchBase

MyBlogLog connected people before there was anything like Twitter or Facebook (at least not in its current form). It put a face on the blogosphere and made strangers friends. Soon we will be saying bye bye to MyBlogLog. Although this is old news, I wanted to write and say farewell.

Dear MyBlogLog Customer,

You have been identified as a customer of Yahoo! MyBlogLog. We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011. Your agreement with Yahoo!, to the extent that it applies to the Yahoo! MyBlogLog, will terminate on May 24, 2011.

After May 24, 2011 your credit card will no longer be charged for premium services on MyBlogLog. We will refund you the unused portion of your subscription, if any. The refund will appear as a credit via the billing method we have on file for you. To make sure that your billing information is correct and up to date, visit https://billing.yahoo.com.

Questions?

If you have questions about these changes, please visit the Yahoo! MyBlogLog help pages.

We thank you for being a customer on Yahoo! MyBlogLog.

Sincerely,

The Yahoo! My BlogLog Team

In all honesty this shows Yahoo’s inability to capitalize on a potential social media opportunity and not a reflection of MyBlogLog.

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I’m really curious to see how Microsoft and Yahoo merge their two independent PPC systems.  Account transitions are slated for October and from what I understand all Yahoo accounts will be converted over to Bing AdCenter accounts. This means your AdCenter account will not be affected but if you have a Yahoo Search Marketing account then you may be in for a bumpy ride.

Joseph Kerschbaum over at Search Engine Watch has a detailed article on the status of the transition as well as how differing features between the two systems will be managed. There is reason to be apprehensive of the transition and Joseph has this suggestion:

Hopefully, all of the account transitions will go smoothly and advertisers won’t feel too much discomfort during the change.

However, I have one tip that is pretty straight forward and should save you a lot of headaches. To avoid all of these account merger issues, you should just open an adCenter account now and build it exactly how you want it. If you already have an adCenter account, then you’re already covered and you won’t need to do anything.

Take a look at Joseph’s article to see why he makes this recommendation.

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The winner of the Tempe Thumbs video contest was announced earlier this week. A hearty congratulations to Suzanne B. (a.k.a. Crunchy Green Mom). Here is her winning entry:

Hope you enjoy Tempe Suzanne. Do share your experience on your trip. We look forward to living through you!

Using Flash can really jazz up your website. In fact many of the really beautiful sites I see are made using Flash. There has always been two knocks against using too much Flash on a website. The first is that it can be a bandwidth hog. However, with the proliferation of broadband use this is less and less of a problem. But still you need to be aware that certain segments of your visitors may not be on T1 type connections and hence may experience delays in load time causing them to abandon the site.

The second reason for not using Flash is the video content has not been  crawlable by search engine bots. It is essentially very unfriendly when it comes to improving your sites SEO. This is because the text and the marketing message contained in the Flash presentation is not indexable by search engines. Which means all that clever messaging, keyword use and cool graphics actually has no effect in helping you achieve greater search engine visibility. Not quit what you had in mind when you designed your website.

Well, that is all about to change starting today. Adobe (which owns Flash) announced that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable. Ars Technica has the following report:

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only website is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

This announcement has been a long time coming, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, “[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.”

This is great news for developers and web marketers. However, I will still caution you to not go overboard with the use of Flash on your website. Pay attention to where you visitors are coming from and the type of connections they have. Additionally, sometimes all the moving parts and movie like presntations can distract form your message. While Flash may now no longer be a SEO deterrent, it doesn’t mean you need to implement it to the max. As in anything there is a good balance and you should strive to acheive that balance.

MySpace seems to be gearing up to go head to head against Yahoo! and Google. According to a report in AdWeek they are in the final stages of re-designing the layout to make it more of a portal setup. This is of course different from their current page – which is more of a mish-mash blend of too much information coming from too many directions. At least that is how I feel when go to log in.

Here is what can be expected:

The new page, MySpace sales and marketing president Jeff Berman said, will feature “bigger and more powerful” options for brand takeovers.

“We saw there was enormous opportunity to build a new home page and navigation that were cleaner and easier and enabled the community to experience the site in a deeper way and at the same time provide enormous brand opportunities,” said Berman.

Businessweek also has a story on this:

MySpace embarks on this makeover with five new features. On June 18, the company will relaunch its homepage. Instead of seeing a few boxes for “cool new videos” and “cool new people,” users will see items such as news stories, ways to call up local weather, links to entertainment portions of the site, and images of top MySpace bloggers. There will also be a cleaner navigation toolbar, a new MySpace TV player with full-screen viewing, and an improved search function that makes it easier to find people, music, and media. “It is more the portal-like model,” Anderson says.

I’m not sure how this will play out. I’m not a big fan of portal sites – but many people seem to visit and enjoy them. I am however, eager to see the page though.