Tracking MyBlogLog Community Page Views

Update 10 June 2008: there seems to be a new MyBlogLog user agent sent for those requests.

Tip: Tracking you website's MyBlogLog community's page views is easy and reliable.

MyBlogLog (MBL) is a ubiquitous widget that fosters community building around any website. A webmaster simply inserts some Javascript and MBL does the rest. Of key interest to a social media addict is the Community's home page on MBL; for example, Social Alerter's MyBlogLog community.

On the community page you'll see that there is the RSS feed registered for that site. It also shows the people who've joined the community. Community owners also get a few extra links at the top giving you stats and allowing you to modify the community's setting.

The question we want to ask: how do we track when someone views your website's community page? It's an interesting metric for any social media buff and marketer.

The answer turns out to be quite simple: MBL requests your RSS feed every single time the community page is viewed. This is interesting on a technical level (giving us a strong indication about how MBL scales its service!) and it also gives us a means to track community page views.

The requests we're looking for are like the following (using Social Alerter's RSS feed as an example):

Yep, an empty user agent and no cookies, but clearly coming from *.mbl.re1.yahoo.com.

So far, I've seen three different IP addresses that do the requests:

• www1.mbl.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.76.199)
• www2.mbl.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.76.198)
• www3.mbl.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.76.197)

In short, when you do the log file gazing, look for requests from the C-block 69.147.76.*.

HOWEVER... there is more to this story. MBL now has an API and these can trigger requests from similar IP addresses. The differentiating factor is that these API requests are disclosed using the user agent; i.e., the user agent string is not empty for API requests. The API requests have a handful of different user agent strings and I have a feeling they'll continue to evolve as the API is stabilized and evolves out of beta testing. For now, you'll be able to tell the difference easily.