Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Are you really logged out of MyBlogLog?

Yahoo appears to be getting a little ambitious with their tracking cookies. They already own two of the most effective bookmarking / networking sites on the net - MyBlogLog and, of course, del.icio.us .

Sometimes you want to be 'seen' on other peoples blogs and sometimes you may not.

Now that MyBlogLog is using the universal Yahoo sign-in, you have to log-out twice. Once out of MyBlogLog and again out of the Yahoo network. That makes complete sense to us.

The problem? You're still logged-in to MyBlogLog.

Two solutions... Close your browser and re-open it OR use the most overlooked and our highest rated free utility out there - CCleaner (or Crap Cleaner). Dump your cookies and cache in nanoseconds (when you want to).

You'll probably be AMAZED at the amount of MB (or GB!) of unnecessary 'stuff' you unload.

During the install, you may (or may not?) want to opt-out of the Yahoo toolbar and automatic updates. I'm not big on having 15 or 20 'web-aware' programs running and always opt-out of auto-updates and instead, do an occasional global update of the network.

It seems that everyone targets Google for tracking (and, of course, Doubleclick ... :). The reality is, almost every major website site does it (and not just search engines), whether they use the information internally or sell it. It'll never change. It's a huge profit center with more start-ups enabling user tracking every day.

Most surfers ignore it. I don't run CCleaner after every session but it's nice to get a 'fresh start' and clean the 'gunk' (some potentially dangerous gunk?) out of the cache every once and a while.

Sidenote: Someone asked today why comments aren't enabled on this blog. The fact is, at the moment, we just don't have time to moderate them. In about 45 days, we will, and comments will be enabled along with the new look and feel of SEO and Tech Daily which should premier around the same time.

Update: Ian Kennedy's visit to our blog had me revisit this post, something I rarely do. It's important to point out that not all cookies are tracking cookies. Some cookies simply tell the provider that you are logged in, so you can stay logged in. Others provide anonymous surfing habit information or enable analytics. Where would we be without analytics? Cookies continue to play an important role on the web. We obviously still use MyBlogLog on this blog and keep it turned on while wandering blogs quite often. The return visits are interesting and occasionally important. Ian didn't request this post, but I will drop him a note ..... via MyBlogLog :) Charlie

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