Our new BuzzTracker design, here at http://www.buzztracker.com, incorporates MyBlogLog communities very prominently above the fold on almost every page. We’ve been getting lots of questions of why this is, why did we do it, etc., so I thought I’d write this post to try to give a little insight into our thinking.

Let me start by saying that the principals of Participate Media have been thinking about and implementing online communities for over 10 years now — we worked together at Participate.com (sold to Outstart in November 04) from 96-04 — and we remain more convinced than ever at the power of online communities and social media to build brands, create loyalty, create value-added services, and help fuel explosive growth. We even wrote a series of whitepapers on Online Community, Return on Participation, and other topics relevant to the success of making this social media work. I posted about the Return on Participation whitepaper, and MyBlogLog here (whitepaper is available).

One of the largest values we believe a Publisher can deliver its readers is recognition — showing people off and rewarding them for their participation. MyBlogLog is the ultimate recognition engine — and even better — it rewards people for reading our site, and gives them a very quick way to find out who else is reading and enjoying the web site. For a newer site just building their first critical mass, MyBlogLog allows us to deliver this terrific feature NOW by leveraging the critical mass across the MBL network.

Now the other key benefit that you have to provide to readers is the ability to interact; to comment; to discuss. You must allow your readers to become part of your brand and to define your brand. We’ve gotten a lot of questions on — “where can I comment?” and we will be launching this shortly. We expect to work with MyBlogLog as well on this feature — as we will instantly have thousands of people registered to comment on our site.

Finally — we’re also very excited by what we expect to be a furious roll out of new features allowing publishers to show off most frequent readers, new readers, etc to the site — essentialy this should become a great platform for us to deliver more value to our user base.

What do you think?