Yesterday, rumors surfaced around Yahoo!’s imminent shutdown of its MyBlogLog service. Frankly, it’s no secret within Yahoo! that we’re actively discussing the future of MyBlogLog. However, it’s also true that we have not made any final decisions at this point. Is a shutdown on the table? Sure, that’s an option. But there are other options as well. We know this creates some uncertainty for current MyBlogLog users. While we aren’t quite ready to share more details, we promise to keep you posted.

Chris Yeh, Head of YDN

On May 24, 2011 With over 450,000 blog communities and roughly 645,000 members of MyBlogLog are not going to rejoice at all. Because, Yahoo! will officially discontinue MyBlogLog service effective May 24, 2011.

Those who are community member of MyBlogLog has already got the notification as I got today. Here is the draft.

Yahoo! MyBlogLog Shutdown Notification

MyBlogLog journey started in January 2005, with a goal to give a social network for Blogger, but later it was acquired by Yahoo! in January, 2007. This long journey is going to end. We can say it is a death of a strong social network. So, what we can guess from this shutdown of such a valuable property of Yahoo? Is it a new beginning or end of social network. For Yahoo! it’s a new beginning, because Yahoo! is recommending MyBlogLog member to move into Yahoo! Pulse, where you can see your social updates from your favorite networks in one place.

PayPerPost v4.0

• Clean Dashboard
• Get instant approval for newly added blogs
• No more Advertiser-set prices
• More control over accepted paid post

So, it’s a complete new experience with PayPerPost. Hope new version will come out of development soon so that everybody can taste “the next evolution in sponsored conversations”.

Sponsored Conversations

Kmart gave some bloggers a free shopping spree in exchange for a blog post about the experience — a practice we call sponsored conversation. With appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity, this practice will take its place alongside public relations and advertising activities in the blogosphere. Marketers should take advantage of sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation. To succeed, you should get to know the bloggers you plan to work with and set expectations across your organization.

courtesy: Forrester Research, Inc.

So, it is a positive approach of Forrester to Marketers to go ahead with Sponsored Conversation or Sponsored Post. From the voice of Josh Bernoff, author of Groundswell it’s more clear that Sponsored Conversation has some weight and comes in between of PR and advertising.

When you look at sponsored conversation in context, you can see it fits into a nice spot in the groundswell between PR and advertising. In PR, you try to get a blogger to talk about you, but your chances of success are hit or miss. In advertising, you can be sure to get a placement, but it’s not in the blogger’s voice. Sponsored conversation — paying a blogger to write about your product — fits in the middle — it guarantees a post, and it’s in the blogger’s voice.

Although, all this things are happening amidst some ongoing controversy about Sponsored Post[link-1, link-2, link-3, link-4]. And that is why Josh Bernoff started his post(“Why sponsored conversation — aka paid blog posts — can make sense”) writing with, “I’m ready to weigh in one a very controversial topic: is it ethical and appropriate to pay bloggers to post about your products?”.

So, bloggers and marketers can’t thrown away the debate on Sponsored Post, and that’s why Forrester has mandated marketers to follow some instructions (How To Do Sponsored Conversations Effectively) before going ahead with Sponsored Conversation and also directed to “Look out For Pitfalls“. More focus is given in the report on transparency, I mean on disclosure—that the post is been sponsored by some company.

Now, it’s time to see whether the controversy still continues or not, because Forrester has already predicted “A new Industry is Born”.