You’ve probably heard the old adage that “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. One contact that you have in your network could make the difference between fast-tracking your career path or spending five years in hard slog getting to the same opportunity.

There has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere in general about online social networks and how they can be leveraged for shortcutting those years off your career path. I recently discovered one social networking tool that I quite like: MyBlogLog. It’s been gaining a lot of momentum and I predict a meteoric rise in adoption in 2007.

It is easy to sign up for a MyBlogLog account. It takes just a few minutes. You upload a photo and create a profile. Then, as you visit blogs that participate in MyBlogLog, for a fleeting period of time, your photo and username are displayed under “Recent Readers” in the blog’s sidebar.

Of course, this has the potential to be gamed and spammed — as does anything. In fact spammers have already started creating profiles and continuously hammering popular blogs to keep their profile/mini-advertisement up on the Recent Readers board as long as possible. But that is not really a huge problem yet.

The opportunity for you to leverage this network is huge, because it gives you a way to dialogue and forge relationships with other bloggers, current blog readers, and potential readers. You can add people as contacts. You can add websites as communities that you belong to. You can hang out in communities where your target market is present and start making insightful comments which will likely attract those community members to check out your blog.

If you have a blog, your opportunities to network on MyBlogLog multiply. You can claim your own community and then cultivate a user base on it. You can see who is a fan of your blog or a fan of you. Then on your blog you can display the Recent Readers widget. And you can display the images of your readers alongside their comments using a plugin like MyAvatars.

MyBlogLog has legs. I am convinced of that and Yahoo! is apparently convinced too — having recently acquired the company.

I am not the only one who is convinced of Myblogblog’s power for networking. David Temple had a great post about how he MyBlogLogged his way up the social media ladder. Definitely check it out.