It was announced late last night that Yahoo! has bought the blogging community and widget MyBlogLog. Although the agreed amount was not disclosed, a Forbes source claims an amount of over $10m was offered.

There has been surprisingly little reaction to this announcement in the forums, despite being a Highlighted Post at WebmasterWorld.

Rather than letting me ramble on about what MyBlogLog is, Danny has an extremely comprehensive write-up over at Search Engine Land.

What I'm most interested in however, is what value the community and widget site will offer Yahoo! at a very important stage of their battle with Google. Is this simply a case of seeing value in the community aspect of the site, or the fact that their widget for placing on your blog, gives them access to the same (if not more) information as a your web analytics package? If this data was fed into the main Yahoo! beast, it would offer insight into what users do when they reach a specific site; maybe even using the data to manipulate natural search and paid search results. As the widget would only feature on blogs, the data won't necessarily effect individual site, although still provides interesting user behaviour information.

Further discussion over at WebmasterWorld Forums.

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