Most companies would prefer that if you have questions or comments regarding their service, you would send them a nice e-mail to their support staff, or post it to a company-sanctioned, moderated forum. But as we all know, sending e-mail to busy support people can be a guessing game as to how long you'll wait to get a response, if you hit the right person, or if they will answer your question at all. I've found the absolute fastest, sure-fire way to talk directly with people at Web-aware services is through the blog.

Blogs are the future of company to customer communications. Those companies that allow the highest transparency to customers to management or rank and file employees will win the much sought after "hearts and minds of the people." It's already worked on me a number of times in the last few months, with small companies like Technorati and LinkedIn to larger companies like Google and Yahoo! subsidiary MyBlogLog, as you might have seen over the last few days.

Google Reader Example:

In March of 2007, I listed ten improvements I hoped to see from my RSS go-to destination, Google Reader.

A little more than a day later, Google responded, with Mihai Parparita, an Engineer working on Google Reader, writing in the coments, "Funnily enough, the Reader team just had a big all-day brainstorming session about where to go next, and ideas similar to many of your suggestions were discussed."

I've since been told that the post is occasionally referenced within Google and helps add signal to the noise of user feature demands. Though I was initially nervous they would take my suggestions the wrong way, I am glad they recognized I was and remain quite positive on the service.

LinkedIn Example:

Later that month, I offered similar suggestions for LinkedIn, the leading business-focused social network. Steve Ganz, of LinkedIn, later wrote to let me know that some of the suggestions had just been implemented, and more were to come! As he kindly wrote, "These are all great ideas. Thanks so much for the great feedback, Louis! Stay tuned."

Technorati Examples:

Despite Technorati's occasional issues and recent management changes, I enjoy the service. But the downtime can make users weary. In June, I noted another outage, and not too much longer after my post, Ian Kallen wrote to say "We're bringing our systems back online now".

In April, I was eagerly awaiting the new issue of Technorati's popular state of the Web and openly speculated it was imminent. Then-CEO David Sifry took time from his busy schedule to say "LOL, keep your eyes on the blog.", and later returned, after 2:30 a.m. to say "The new State of the Live Web is now up!", which was very cool.

And that leaves one more, for now:

MyBlogLog Example:

On Monday, I discussed what the future of MyBlogLog would be after their acquisition by Yahoo!. While I wasn't overly glowing in my comments, two MyBlogLog employees offered their comments, with Ian Kennedy first saying "We're alive and well thanks and have been busy...", and later, Robyn Tippins coming back, offering thanks for the comments, and unexpectedly, a free Pro account! Of course, I recognize I'm being wooed, but I can take it. Now I'll have an even better chance to look into MyBlogLog's services and can speak more directly to what they're doing well and how they could continue to improve.

Not every company comes by when I make comments. Apple doesn't, and likely won't. Microsoft hasn't yet, and neither has TiVo. That could be due to internal policies on communication, PR, customer service and blogging, or they aren't as in tune to the Web's power to connect customers with companies. I appreciate the extra effort taken from Google Reader, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, and Technorati to talk to me directly and openly as individuals, and outside of the corporate firewall. I look forward to more, and encourage the rest of you bloggers to be comfortable in analyzing what you use every day and thinking aloud about how you could make change and make a difference.

The visual tag cloud engine ZoomClouds seems to have disappeared, taking a significant piece of my blog sidebar with it. Whether this is a short-term bug or longer term outage, the service, which used to show those topics I most frequently blog about (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, ANtics) is down for the count, and there is no news as to why or for how long.

Promoted by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch in March of 2006, I added the service the next day, and for the better part of 18 months, have enjoyed seeing certain keywords grow with increased use, and others fall out with neglect.

But now, the service's publishers seem to have gone away, without any notice as to why.

The URL Zoomclouds.com, which redirected to zoomclouds.egrupos.net, now redirects one final time to the generic site egrupos.net, home of the service's authors, and my ZoomClouds widget remains blank.

You can see cached images of blog ZoomClouds on Google, but for now, the service appears to be dead. Unfortunately, this means I will be pulling ZoomClouds from my sidebar, and I'm not sure if I'll be looking for a replacement.

Update: As luck would have it, ZoomClouds are back up and running, as of mid-day today. No sign as to why they were down, but it sure did make me look silly.

In a world where total page views don't amount for much, and spikes of unique visitors from Digg, StumbleUpon or Slashdot can be gone in an instant, there's something to be said for the more "squishy" metrics, like how many comments a post received, or whether bloggers found your work interesting enough to link to. Out of the ashes of Web 1.0's eyeball-oriented metrics came the rise of Google's PageRank, and Technorati Authority, as well as other, rarely useful sites, like Alexa.

If a comment to a post carries a certain amount of weight, it's safely assumed that a link carries more weight, as it potentially drives new visitors your way. With that said, how many links does a podcast count as? That's the amusing conundrum I've hit after hearing WinExtra's Steven Hodson's soliloquy on Web services Last.fm and MyBlogLog, in large part spurred by discussions here over the last week or so. It's odd enough finally putting a voice to a person whom I've traded comments and e-mails with over the last few months, and even odder still to hear my name mentioned as provoking thoughts on where these services are headed.

(Download the Podcast Here)

Steven wasn't the only one who sent links this way today. The MyBlogLog story was captured in Robert Scoble's Link Blog, which always leads to a short-term spurt in visitors from Twitter, and these days, Facebook. Later, the surprisingly popular blog "Grow a Brain" caught up to a post on how your blog is your brand, from earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Kent Newsome rounded up his ninth edition of the Swivel Feeds, in his one-man battle to test the limits of his RSS feed reader. This week's additions included names I had provided, from the aforementioned WinExtra, to ParisLemon, Ken Jennings, Yuvi Panda and Ben Rockwood.

We'll have our peaks and valleys in this whole blogging exercise, but it's nice to be noticed.

MyBlogLog offers an interesting service for bloggers aiming to find out who visits their pages, who is part of their blog's community, and also offers a directory service aimed to finding you new blogs to add to your own reading list.

In January, Yahoo! purchased MyBlogLog for $10 million, after months of speculation the site was for sale. Since that time, we haven't heard much. The company's blog shows the development team moved to Yahoo! in the middle of this year, despite some defections, and is looking to expand.

(Oddly enough, the site's e-mail listed for new target hires was the same gentleman who shortly thereafter wrote he was "pulling up stakes" and leaving, which doesn't bode well. But as we know, luckily, a service usually isn't one person deep.)

The biggest innovations from MyBlogLog this summer were the introduction of "Community Messaging", where a site owner could "blast" community members with a message directly to their own MyBlogLog pages, to alert them of news, poll them or simply gain feedback; the introduction of extensive tagging, and continued to work on efforts to weed out spam across the service.

I use MyBlogLog as a widget on this blog to see faces of visitors I know well, and I use my own MyBlogLog page to track site visit statistics, and to watch any day to day additions to the louisgray.com community, a small, but loyal, group. While I enjoy the service, I believe I'm either not using MyBlogLog to its fullest potential, or hope the service has many more updates to soon debut to keep it on the cutting edge.

First, I hope the service can recognize what it is not. It is not a social network, like Facebook. While they've erred on that side before, with the addition of Twitter status updates, for example, MyBlogLog is exactly what its name implies - it is My Blog's Log, not My Personal Log. As a result, the site should focus on information relevant to the blog as an entity - including statistics of visitors, and individuals, as well as most frequently read pages, most common incoming and outgoing links, as it does today.

Second, I hope it can focus. If it's to become one of my go-to site statistics hubs, it should have more than just one day's data available at one time, but should instead show trends for daily visits, pages, and even visitors. If it can track an individual in my community came to my page, there's no reason it can't flip on the Big Brother switch and show me how many times that one individual visited my site in the last 7, 30 or 90 days. In theory, MyBlogLog is tracking more data than does SiteMeter and even Google Analytics, and is sitting on a gold mine for individual bloggers here.

Third, as MyBlogLog shows me who is a member of my community, and has the option to show me what additional communities those members are part of, in theory, MyBlogLog could say, for instance, "You and Geekwhat have three communities in common," or taking it a step further, the site could show me who else out there shares many of my own communities. If I am a member of 34 communities, and ParisLemon is a member of 27 of those (I made that up), then those communities we don't share just might be of interest to the other. Using this theoretical search tool, I could also be able to find new people who just might be interested in louisgray.com and have the option to leave them a private message invitation.

MyBlogLog is an interesting service today. It could become a great service tomorrow, with just a few tweaks. Right now, given the site's gaining a bad name for spammers and faux IDs, combined with its low profile after the Yahoo! acquisition, I get the feeling they've stalled momentum. Is the service planning to expand to the fore, as it could, or instead, will it be folded into the Yahoo! behemoth, never to escape? Many bloggers await the answer.

(This post also will be sent to the louisgray.com community as a trial run of that service)

To join the louisgray.com community, click here. To join MyBlogLog, visit their site.