MyBlogLog, the “Whos been reading your blog” widget provider, was acquired by Yahoo late last year. As with many startups acquired by big corporations it seemed MyBlogLog was set for the dead pool with many months passing without any upgrades from their new owner. Although finally, Yahoo has stepped up and announced a sweep of upgrades and changes for the blog community.

The new features include a filter for offensive photos and the ability to sign off so you don’t show up on blogs you don’t want to. The improvements are an obvious since MyBlogLog was suffering from serious spamming. After it’s initial buzz, MyBlogLog’s growth failed to catch on because of spam and scaling issues. What this new announcement means is that an effort by Yahoo to escape the PR hit that Google suffered in its handling of the Dodgeball acquisition.

We, like many other blogs, display the MyBlogLog widget (right top sidebar), which shows recent visitors, along with their photo, to the site. This has resulted in serious spamming and ultimately bloggers removing the widget.

What spam?

Michael Jensen has discovered a way to place your ‘ads’ on top ranking blogs who use the MBL widget. He created a new account with the advertising he wanted included as the profile image. He then opened TechCrunch (the blog he used as an example) in his Firefox browser and set it to autorefresh every minute or so. The result was that the �user� kept coming back to TechCrunch and popping to the top of the widget. Some of the traffic that clicked through to the user page on MyBlogLog made its way back to the destination site.
Here’s what it looked like

This issue will surely be fixed with the announced round of upgrades.

More MyBlogLog hacks can be found here and here which got the ‘author’ temporarily banned.