Yahoo just announced the acquisition of MyBlogLog, the latest blog widget to take the blogosphere by storm, for $10M. MyBlogLog is part social network and part tracking & reporting tool. I read on their blog that they were founded in March 2005 and that they hit 40,000 blog installations in December 2006. I’ve registered the Praized blog here to show you an example.

What it means: this is a very smart and important acquisition for Yahoo. This is the perfect example of what I called the atomization of the web in my 2007 predictions. MyBlogLog is an atomized social network, a MySpace split in thousands of pieces. It’s also part of a trend called the de-portalization of the web discussed here. It transforms the two-way conversation between the blogger and the individual reader into a multi-way conversation between the readers themselves. You can discover people who have the same taste as you, read their blogs and expand your horizon. It’s also a great traffic driver for a blog. I suspect we’ll see many more functionalities being atomized in 2007.