The announcement has filtered out of a semi relaunch of MyBlogLog courtesy of its Yahoo benefactors - to near universal Ennui 2.0, for example here. Indeed, it was news to many that the takeover had been done back in January.

MyBlogLog - little more than a gimmick? A piece of javascript just too far?

One day, much along the lines of the WordPress download crack, someone is going to get to the relevant URI and create an interesting havoc on the few million sites that host the 3rd party code. It’s the downside of Web Services.

Yahoo bought the company and it subsided into a quiet black hole. Even with the data mining, where’s the real money here? And although this is not Yahoo’s question to answer, why is this service better administered by a web giant?

It’s very difficult to avoid the conclusion - a shiny Web2.0 acquisition made in some haste and repented at some leisure.

This seems to be a rough concensus over the state of play in the sponsored/paid/whatever blogging sector.

Currently this market is embryonic - similar to that for search engines around 1998, when early leaders, eg Altavista, Northern Lights, were eclipsed by one operation with a clearly better technical/business model. However, as it stands, the major brokers are:

Reviewme
Hand-in-glove with Text Link Ads - and probably the market leader. Had some problems with their scoring algorithm refusing to update and being open to manipulation - as are they all - but in general appears a competent operation, with potential for growth.

Payperpost
Took a lot of the flak over the ethical issue, has courted the good/bad publicity ever since and seems to be doing well enough for itself despite. Relatively low number of qualified posts for bloggers starting up.

Loudlaunch
As the name suggests, made a considerable noise but, ironically, problems with their startup. Lost a significant number of user accounts and could take up to six weeks to approve a blog. Seem to be getting their act together now.

SponsoredReviews
USP is was that bloggers bid the advertiser for the opportunity over price - advertiser may decline/accept. Bloggers seem to like this - except for the relatively large numbers of bids left hanging because the advertizer simply ignores and fails to decline - the blogger cannot plan ahead how much work may or may not need to be done.

Blogitive
A complex model, involving third-party, “ghost” blogging and a serious number of mail-order brides. May become big, probably won’t.

Other entrants: to early to judge, although Smorty shows promise, they look to have absorbed lessons from the other’s early mistakes.

What do you reckon? - if you’ve got any experience or feedback that contradicts all this completely, let us know…

If you take the rarely said but significantly-held opinion that Yahoo have to make some changes soon or struggle, what could be more likely…

“… the two companies - which first explored the idea a few years ago and then went their own ways - were looking at ways they could pair their strengths to create a greater competitor to Google…”

Well, the point being that what would be the point of msn? Microsoft have never been in love with the internet. If they could have got away with calling it DeskWeb, they would have..

Obviously the combination of PPC programmes would be interesting and tricky - but maybe it’s the blogs - Spaces and Yahoo360 - where the greatest effect in terms of change of competitor could lie - although how you’d go about challenging Blogger is the real and present nightmare. The company-knows-best, rather controlling attitude of MS, approach, ie login to free hotmail every 30 days or else, the tight controls on what code/scripts can appear on Spaces, would presumably extend.

However, by the end of the day, it appeared that the story was misguided, or at least out-of-date, unless you define “takeover” as “partnership.”

Yes, a non-story - with testing-the-water as a heading… You’d sort of think it has to be - one day - if not now…