Yahoo Kool-Aid: Y! Mash and MyBlogLog

Vernacular speech is pretty crazy stuff. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is a metaphor for embracing something fully, often unthinkingly. This metaphor has its roots in either psychedelic drugs or mass religious suicide. Take your pick.

Anyway, with that, I’ll cop to two new social-software, web two-point-oh oddnesses. The first is Yahoo! Mash, YASN. I’m not sure what to make of it, I try all this stuff and this one seems not to have much for it. It’s another reminder that I still have been unable to regain my proper nickname (artlung) with Yahoo. I put in a false birthday lo those many years ago and there’s no way to recover the account. Contacts with Y! over the years have been fruitless.

Oh, I’m not talking about Mash. Yeah, well, there was not much to do, no offense to my pal Lilia who both introduced me to my current wife and invited me to Mash. If you want to connect with me, go ahead, the address is http://mash.yahoo.com/websandiego — let’s hope, for Yahoo’s sake, that it’s more successful than Yahoo 360. It appears that Mash requires Yahoo registration at this point, so don’t complain to me if the links above don’t work. 🙂

MyBlogLog was purchased by Yahoo about a year ago. It purports to build up a community passively as people visit your site, and entice them to do so actively as well. I’m ambivalent about this idea. As I was saying the other day to some other bloggers, I initially set up my site with no comments by active choice because dammit, it’s my site, not yours. Get your own site! Of course, I changed course on that when in 2004 I moved from Blogger to WordPress as my blogging platform. I’ve not regretted allowing comments. Fun fact, Sassy was my first commenter.

Feel free to “friend” me on MyBlogLog or join the ArtLung community. What is the benefit of doing either of those things? Uh, I don’t know. I’m a poor salesman. Maybe you can carp about the lack of longer blog posts, or more emotional writing that I used to do? Hmm… maybe this is not such a hot idea.

(And yes, I can see the irony plain as day that just the other day I was carping about Ryze as a social network, meanwhile I’m joining these — maybe I have a problem).