When I have something important to work on and need a distraction, there are several places I go. BlogExplosion provides a never ending list of websites to visit with the promise of sending people back to your own blog. MyBlogLog provides ample blogs to visit. When you visit them, if they have the MyBlogLog widget up, it leaves your picture on the blogs you’ve visited, and if you’re lucky, people will click on your image and visit your blog. If I want to check sites that I’m following more actively, I check the approximately 300 blogs that I follow with Bloglines Then there are Twitter’s to read, conversations in Second Life to join in on, and if all else fails, you can always read your referrer log.

Today, I learned that my blog post about Colgate Smiles in Second Life is the highest ranked ‘Colgate Smiles’ post on Google outside of Colgate’s posts. Not that a lot of people do searches on ‘Colgate Smiles’, but I was pleased. I liked that post.

Likewise, people looking for information on Second Life personality Maelstrom Baphomet are likely to find my post about last November’s Second Life Banking Crisis. Probably not another major search term, but an interesting distraction.

Yet my post about the MyBlogLog API has gotten a lot of interesting focus. In particular, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote an interesting article about The Significance of the MyBlogLogAPI and points to my post.

It is an interesting article. He talks about the Data Portability Workgroup which tries to tie together things like OpenID, Microformats, RDF, RSS, OPML and APML. Marshall talks a little bit about APML in his post and so I’ve headed off to explore APML a little.

APML is the Attention Profile Markup Language. “The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of your ranked interests.”

ma.gnolia supports APML and OpenId. I set up my account on ma.gnolia quite a while ago, but it never really captured my attention. Today, I played with ma.gnolia a little bit more. I enabled the APML and didn’t get anything useful. I set ma.gnolia to post things to Orient Lodge, which worked, but just barely. Ma.gnolia is going to drop back to the ‘explore it more some other day’ category.

Back at ReadWriteWeb, I got the idea of finding out what tags apply to my contacts in MyBlogLog. Currently, I have 55 contacts on MyBlogLog. 11 of them do not have any tags. The rest have an average of 4.6 tags. 151 different tags are used and only 23 apply to more than one person. The most common are blogger, web 2.0, blog, blogging, and MyBlogLog. These don’t tell me as much. The next grouping are topics that tell me a bit more, politics, Social Media, nptech, history, News, and nonprofit. These are topics that I’m interested, so this grouping isn’t very surprising.

My next step was to try and find the tags of the people that are reading my blog. I ran into a bunch of problems trying to do this. First, it was hard to find the community id. One would think that members.community.authored.list would return the community id, but it didn’t. I had problems getting community.find.byname to work. Turns out that if you have a space in the community name, the find doesn’t work, unless you replace the space with a plus sign. I ran into the same problem with tags with a space in them. In retrospect, that should have been perfectly obvious. When you are constructing your string, it needs to be URL encoded. However, the console that MyBlogLog provides for testing didn’t give any useful information about that being the problem.

With that out of the way, I tried finding my most recent readers. Here, I ran into my next problem. It appears as if the community.readers.list method is ignoring the count parameter, except for error checking. If I try to get more than a 100 readers, it tells me that I can’t. However, if I try to get 10 readers, it only returns 5. If I ask for only three, it still returns 5. Likewise, the start parameter seems not to be working. So, currently, I can only get the tags for the five most recent readers. So, I didn’t get much information to play with there. Also, it looks like it doesn’t return the people from the most recent backwards. (For those interested, the tags of my five most recent readers at the point I wrote this were blogger, business, davao, facebook, free call overseas, linkedin, market, MBL, Milan, MyBlogLog, nptech, Philippines, realestate, salesforce.com, Social Media, socialentrepreneurship, socialnetworking and Yahoo.)

Now, five hours after I started this distraction, I figure it is time to post the blog entry before I head off on yet another different tangent.