MyBlogLog Reacts to Boycott, Reinstates Shoemoney

Hi,

Do you know why they have banned you?

Andy,

I would be with you if Shoemoney hadn’t have released private info. Seems to me that MyBlogLog was looking out for bloggers and not Shoemoney. Am I wrong on this one?

By not contacting them, didn’t he put us all at risk?

I think they did the right thing. The right decision for Shoemoney would have been to report the bug and then take credit for it later, after they closed the loop.

Doug

Secure — I’m breaking my vow of silence about this, because I can’t stand hearing that question over and over. The flaw he pointed out was fixed within 45 minutes of Shoe originally posting the story, and we posted this on Shoe’s comments. He was too busy updating his post with additional member’s data to notice.

Andy –

That’s like asking Google how confident they are that people can’t game AdSense. I am comfortable saying that no one has ever been able to get to your personal information and that we have instituted a major security improvement to keep people from spoofing cookies. We’re working on reducing spam as explained in our recent blog post and we’re taking steps to reduce the opportunities for clickfraud.

Are we ever going to keep people from making their avatars voluptuous women for marketing purposes? Probably not.

Are we always going to be ahead of SEO-types (sorry) who want to game the system for their own gain? Probably not.

Is this good enough to be on your site? Only you can say. But I respect your decision either way.

Andy — MyBlogLog was launched a s away for people to connect with each other, whether it’s authors with readers or readers with readers. Immediately we found that people started using us a discovery mechanism and that was awesome. A nice side benefit of that was all the people posting about how much their traffic goes up when they start using us. Yays all around.

But recently, I’ve seen a load of people complaining about all the “join my community” spam and all the pictures of busty women being used as a lure to bring people to their pages. I’m comfortable saying this is not behavior we want because it’s ultimately a lose / lose game. It will cause people to remove the widgets (reducing your distribution) and these aren’t qualified leads, so why do you want them anyway?

There’s a big difference between “use MBL” as you put it and “game MBL” as I put it. Are we really that far apart?

I say “Yay” to MBL and it’s not getting boycotted by me or any of my clients.

One fantastic example, Black In Business (http://www.blackinbusiness.org) not only put a face to a blog but a race to it as well. Jim’s traffic has skyrocketed because of MBL because it offered what no other community could… a face to a name.

And “Yay” to MBL for fixing the hole within an hour of Shoemoney’s Link Baiting.

Eric, my point is that perhaps a better course of action in this case would have been to say “thanks for pointing that out to us” instead of banning a user.

Next time there is an bug, perhaps, you will get unpleasant surprise instead of a heads up.

Something to think about …

I read the shoemoney blog entry and was quite amused. I do applaud the quick fix as well. The part I would question through all of this is how good is the code in the first place. If something like cookie security was not considered, what else can be gamed.

I personally would have consulted with the company that just acquired me before venturing on such a task. This may not be a full PR nightmare, but I still personally consider Jeremy as a top and well respected blogger.

Although as we know, making controversial statements to the blogasphere can have an amazing ability to drive traffic. But I personally would not have made the same decision.

I’m really torn by this since MLB is really indispensable to me (as a minor blog) but this debacle really diminished my respect for MLB.

These are the people who stood by MLB during the rough patches and even defended the founder’s integrity against JZ’s faux pas. Just kick them in the nuts. I’m sure they wont mind.

That’s like arresting a dude for sexual assault because he tapped on the shoulder of a naked woman in public for telling her, “miss, you should wear some clothes because these streets are dangerous”.

To be frank I no longer see how MLB is even worth a couple million dollars when the app has more security holes than something whipped up by script kiddies.

Seriously, if you have time to read all these blogs you should have your nose to the grindstone and be cranking away code to address these issues. What harm did Shoemoney do that the legion of spammers still lurking MLB couldn’t do or have already done?

I think the way you handled this security issue would make Microsoft blush.

DDN — nice of you to join the party. I’ll tell you what. If Shoe agrees with you that he didn’t update the original post within minutes from 3 uIDs to 12 uIDs then I will personally have him reinstated tomorrow and give him a lifetime Pro account.

The missing piece was PR from MBL (they do have a blog, right?) that might have gone something like

“wow… it’s amazing to see so many users adopting our service so fast. We are really excited to see the validation that the MBL platform is capable of so much more, and also how amazingly innovative the blogging community is. We’ll have to fix some of the loop holes of course, and we’ve got great people working on keeping things moving forward, but keep the feedback coming and let us know what we’re doing right and what you need from us…”

Instead we get “what planet” comments. Yah.

Whether Shoemoney should have contacted MBL or not is a matter of some debate.

However the move to ban him seems like a bad PR move and it should have been blindingly obvivous to them in advance.

However given the blogospheres reaction the only thing they can do is bite the bullet and reinstate him.

It’s seems much like a the techcrunch uk situation where what might seem a reasonable reaction wasn’t seen as reasonable.

Seeing how reliant MBL is on its community and the current spate of bad press it would make sense to backtrack.

C’mon…both you nerds have great pocket protectors. There’s no need to keep arguing over it.

Your going to boycott a service because they banned someone that was trolling them and posting exploits ?

lol.. you are really to much.

I maybe the only one in the blogosphere on the side of MBL

This is vigilantly justice. He could have found the bugs and told them to MBL but instead he made them public for his own benefit.

I completely agree with what MBL did. Imagine someone finding a hole in MarketingPilgrim or whoevers blog (or site) and posting it to thousands of people who can use it for their own benefit and not telling you. I’d bet you’d be pretty ticked too.

Was there nothing in there TOS about abuse to the system? If not that is a major oversight by there part.

Assuming there is…

I do not agree with the fact that Shoemoney deserved an explanation. It is debatable depending on their TOS and it may have been the correct move from a business aspect but I do not think they did anything wrong. You break the law, you get punished. You speed you get a ticket, you rarely get the chance to justify your lead-foot.

I assume it was a snap reaction to someone embarrassing them in a public arena. I don’t know many sites who will politely email people who abuse their system, Digg doesnt, Myspace doesnt, facebook doesnt. Not that not doing so makes it right but its a commonly accepted practice.

However, I do agree that the service has gone down the crapper, honestly I never saw the benefit outside of a stats package but thats a story for another day.

Ok, just deleted my account over there as well.

I’m with another commenter that mentioned his clients like it. Mine too. Two of my clients love it and understand it’s an special infant that will grow to become a 7 foot giant.
Why didn’t the blogger in question just send the MBL guys a quick note instead of exposing the snags by blogging it?
Sometimes people are chasing the next scoop too hard I think.

Gypsy,

Well by definition a boycott is temporary. I think a lot of people are also realizing how useless MBL is and just deleting their accounts at the same time.

Also, some of the “players involved” can’t even login to delete their accounts if they wanted to.

There’s probably 5% of blogonauts who are upset by this, and these tend to be the more prolific writers. The original (?)link-bait item has got the attention it deserved. As they say, there’s no bad news and MBL is probably ahead in visibility because of it.

For the other 95% of us who are slightly less prolific, there’s a good deal of satisfaction with what MBL delivers. Let’s move on.

Thanks for that.. I just felt some folks may be dumping accounts ‘for the cause’ and that more backlash could follow should everyone make up and play nice…

It is the wierdest of Boycotts tho – I see U online now and both Schoe and Micheal were logged in there yesterday (Schoe’s got a proxy goin? he he)

How does this work? We simply trash them on our blogs? Boycotting the widget? Do tell….

I always enjoy watching the ‘pack’ go at it ( good humour as in Pasternack/Calacanis goodness).. it does provide some great entertainment.. he he

Play Safe – David

Sorry to not have read every comment. But I totally agree with Doug on this one:

# Doug Karr
Says:
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:09 pm

Andy,

“I would be with you if Shoemoney hadn’t have released private info. Seems to me that MyBlogLog was looking out for bloggers and not Shoemoney. Am I wrong on this one?

By not contacting them, didn’t he put us all at risk?

I think they did the right thing. The right decision for Shoemoney would have been to report the bug and then take credit for it later, after they closed the loop.”

Doug

I don’t see how any injustice was done to shoemoney. I do not intend to boycott mybloglog over a ban shoemoney got whether or not mybloglog is of any use to me. Let shoemoney fight his own battles. Everyones all in arms just because it is shoemoney. Now don’t get me wrong here. I am not against shoemoney and have actually learned some interesting things from him but he isn’t God and it was a mistake err actually in this case I think it was actually an impassible issue. If I owned/operated mybloglog I don’t think I would have done anything different. When the security of the site is threatened I could care less if your President George Bush your out of here till everything is cleared up. I think the whole thing was handled very well.

And that is my two cents on it. And PLEASE do not send me letters about it. I don’t need that. Feel free to comment here though.

he he – so now what??

An interesting precedent set tho… publicizing exploits for link bait… they couldn’t have set it up better if they planned it … link love all around…

I wonder how many folks regret jumping the gun and delteing accounts?

Man, just too many bandwagons for me…

Yahoo buying something, then turning it to shit? And that’s news? More like their standard MO.

Mate stand on your own two feet. If you think honestly that they did some horrendous deed then you boycott them but don’t boycott because somebody else is. BTW folks if some of you haven’t guessed. This is a linkbait. Thats right. Controversial content linkbait. And it appears to have worked pretty well.

That’s what User Generated Content is all about. Everyone loves a crowd. However the crowd is only of those who are in this neck of the woods. I don’t see the industry getting a black eye over this, since no one else knows or cares.

That’s what I see too. How crass.

Simon – that seems a little too much sucking up.