What would happen if your newest post was Dugg and all your friends at BlogCatalog knew about it? And then what would happen if they Dugg it too, letting all of their friends know it. That would be pretty powerful, right?
That was the first few lines of an email that was sent out by the BlogCatalog Team at 3:30 this morning where they announced they will be adding a social dashboard to the BlogCatalog community. This dashboard will allow BlogCatalog members keep up with social contacts. When a friend uploads a new Flickr photo or submit a new article to Digg, you’ll know and then you’ll be able to share it with your network.
The email went on to say:
“In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too. This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. And that’s just for starters.”
BlogCatalog is counting that the dashboard will give other members a reason to visit your profile page where they’ll be able to check for blog updates, Twitter messages, Flickr photo updates, Digg submissions, your YouTube videos and whatever else you might want to share. And by sharing with them, your network might share with their friends.
The email also goes on to suggest that you use the BlogCatalog Social Dashboard to promote your own activities. I find this particularly interesting because I am noticing more and more tools popping up that allow you to leverage multiple social bookmarking sites and to exchange traffic using those sites.
This trend should continue to increase as the number and popularity of social sites increases. Remember, social bookmarking slash social networking sites are all still relatively young and there is much more opportunity and room for maturing on the horizon.
BlogCatalog is already a great social networking site for the blogging community, so it’s interesting to watch as social networks leverage other social networks to boost traffic, engage members, and effectively push for a competitive edge in the market.
Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg will have to start thinking about how to navigate in these interconnected environments to preserve their relevancy and offer value to their members.
Already sites like SUExchange.com and SocialMarker.com are pushing the bookmarking sites off course slightly by creating a secondary marketing of link exchanging and traffic swapping. The social sites might not like it, but the reality is they can’t stop it.
As for BlogCatalog, this is really just a natural progression because they already offer the ability to link your BlogCatalog profile to your other social profiles. But this could definitely step things up a notch by pulling the social networks into a place where the members benefit from promoting each others links and social connections.
Check out the Open Source Marketer BlogCatalog Profile for a good example of a profile that is connected to other social networks.
BlogCatalog has been a good place for me to get ranking in the search engines and the increased blog surface area on their site has helped to bring traffic to my site in the past. You can see how the Open Source Marketer blog posts are pulled into the BlogCatalog profile page which increases your blog exposure. I can’t wait to see what value the social dashboard will add.
According to the email, they’ll be rolling out a beta version in the next few days.
The BlogCatalog Team is asking for feedback after the initial launch so be sure to let them know what you think. And don’t worry. If you don’t like the new features, you will be able to opt, but I don’t think you will.
What do you think about the BlogCatalog announcement? What social tools do you use?
Watching and waiting,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Related Tags: blogcatalog, blogging, social bookmarking, social networks, traffic exchange, traffic generation
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Here’s a Microtween about putting thought bubbles in your videos to add interest, generate visitor traffic, and help people remember your videos better. The standard wisdom is to put your website address at the beginning and end of your videos when you post them to a video sharing service like YouTube so that people will see the address and visit your website. That’s a great piece of advice, but what if you could add a little bit of video spice to your promotional mix and get attention for it?
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Here are a few notes from John Pozadzides at 
Over the past few years blogs have enjoyed increased readership and visitor traffic. But, for the most part, the discussion about how to get traffic to your blog has involved a grocery list of techniques and ideas for bringing in new readers. I rarely hear anyone talking about how you can use offline methods or traditional media to gain blog traffic. 
