So I recently installed the nice little Mybloglog widget on this site (as seen in the sidebar), something that I have been meaning to do for sometime but never really got round too.

Its been pretty popular for a while and hence the recent Yahoo acquisition. You can build communites and see your face or icon all over other sites which have the same Mybloglog widget, which is pretty cool. It also got me thinking…

Some pretty big sites like Techcrunch & SearchengineLand are running these widgets, how easy is it to take advantage of that? Remember, by browsing the relevant site, your icon appears on the Mybloglog widget. Virtually free advertising space if you have a enticing picture like Shoemoney trialed.

All you need is a website, a mybloglog account and a auto refresh program for your browser to make sure your picture appears consistently. Now imagine this on a pretty big scale.

It seems I wasn’t the first to think of this, check out the SoloSEO blog. Here’s a snippet of a test he actually ran a week or two ago -

I then expanded the test to include 20 other sites that use the MyBlogLog sidebar. Mostly I used sites of people I know and blogs I read often, but you could imagine how easy it would be to find 100+ popular blogs using MyBlogLog. I set each of the 20 pages to refresh every 1 minute, and then sat back and left Opera running for about an hour.

Soon I received several email notifications from MyBlogLog about others adding me as a contact, about the same number I get in a couple of days. Later after looking at my site statistics, the peak of my traffic for the day occurred at that precise span of time.

Lets hope people use it for the right reasons, or the Mybloglog widget could start to fade.