I received an IM from the Marketing Hipster this morning regarding Yahoo and their connection with MyBlogLog.

Cord Silverstein contends that it is possible that Yahoo! might be spamming MyBlogLog with fake members just to have a larger community and get better visibility.

• Yahoo! who has recently purchased MyBlogLog and has a community promoting their product Yahoo! Messenger.
• They have an enormous amount of people who joined their community, but never bothered to add a personalized picture.
• These “members” have never gotten a single contact.
• They have never registered a blog of their own.
• They have never received one message from another member.
• But just be chance (?), they each took the time to join one and only one community, the Yahoo! Messenger community.

IMHO, most of the folks over at Yahoo! are not dumb people. If they attempted something this stupid, they had to know that it would come out at some point.

At the same time, they are taking a beating in the search space, despite increases forecasted from Panama. Yahoo!’s business model includes search; but since it is more of an information portal (Hotjobs, Finance, Autos, etc.), it stands to reason that making MyBlogLog a success would certainly add more visitors to the other properties.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that while it’s a lousy user experience and careless, I don't believe it's a conspiracy. The risk of being a shill does not outweigh the success of a program.