I had a great time talking with Ian Kennedy of Yahoo! and MyBlogLog about we’re using their API to accelerate community building. Ian and the team at MBL are pushing the envelope on open-ness with their API strategy. (Also, they have some cool new MBL stickers — they say “You are what you feed” and they’re bright green.) Annnyway, their API let’s you get a ton of info on your visitors and community members, if you have their “recent visitor” widget installed . What we discuss is how we use that data to make it easier for MBL visitors to jump-start community building, by recognizing users people and giving them access to their content, wherever it was created. Here’s the interview:

Think about it — what percentage of your visitors are already a member of an online community, or have a profile on another site? The key is being able to tap into those other networks and activate those users on *your* site.  Got a question, idea or comment about this type of API integration? Please chime in!