Danny mentioned BUMPzee! and a number of other similar services on the Daily SearchCast on 7/12 when Sphinn was launched. It’s not like he ignores the existing services completely in is coverage of search marketing news.

He mentions Sphinn (his baby) more frequent; of course he does. He also mentions SMX more often than SES, especially right before a SMX event. He will still cover SES and PubCon etc.

That he does self promotion is completely natural. They over at SEL also have bills to pay.

I never heart him talking bad about BUMPZee or making claims like “Sphinn” is much better than xyz. It would be inappropriate, if he did.

That friends of SEL and Danny are more likely to post about something they do and probably also in a more forgiving and favorable manner is also normal.

David Naylor and Rand etc. are Danny’s friends. David for example posted about Sphinn the same day Danny announced it on Daily SearchCast, as he said during the show, without Danny asking him to do so.

Am I missing something?

Danny if you or SEOmoz were using tagging on your blogs, and wrote a post regarding the search results for buying blue pills, then tagging it “buy viagra” wouldn’t be a problem.

There are all kinds of ways you could have a more extensive approved category architecture.

In many ways you executed an ideal marketing strategy for the launch.

Invite key people to beta test a few weeks early – that almost guarantees coverage, but it almost guarantees positive coverage, overlooking any shortcomings.
I have read loads of reviews and people who when they do paid reviews of services whose opinion I trust a huge amount only wrote 100% “PR” like reviews of the service.
In many ways I am disappointed in them, because you did mention a competitor in your announcement and due to various commercial reasons it is hard to talk about a competitor in any way if you have a similar product launch.

Those blog search results are not very conclusive

One is my story
One is a splog picking up your story on Google News
Your story doesn’t appear because your feeds aren’t very RSS search friendly
One is a comment by Carsten that I linked to in my post
Maki always writes indepth reviews covering multiple angles – I would be shocked if that wasn’t the case
One is my story on a competing social site that hasn’t been kicked out yet
One is an article on Lockergnome by Tinu, again I would expect Tinu to cover all angles despite being an avid user of both PlugIM and Bumpzee.
Then there is also the coverage from James’ Affiliate Marketing Blog

Can you spot the SEO blogger among those that mentioned both?
I can’t…

So now we look at normal Google search

Most of the listings are for people who have the Sociable plugin, or my Antisocial variant of it (better for SEO) installed, or a link to a community on bumbzee.

Even Pandia’s post only appears on a category listing that contains a mention from March.

All it really highlights is that Pablo Palatnik needs to look at how his RSS is indexed by Google, as his story wasn’t appearing in Blogsearch.

I suppose it is only a minor thing that there are 1500 mentions on Sphinn on Blogsearch and 4 or 5 mention a competitor which you included in your announcement.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=sphinn&btnG=Search+Blogs

The fragmentation isn’t just going to be in the SEO industry, it will also happen in Affiliate marketing.
As an example Affiliates4U which I have only glanced at in the past and didn’t even sign up.

I do agree that multiple communities can do well, but I hate seeing a potential way of unifying various niches under a single community go to waste.

I will be supporting Sphinn, I have a plugin update to finish as one example, but it is a shame about the missed opportunity.

Danny, I believe you misunderstood my comment.

I said that opening BUMPzee! up, to allow the creation of any type of community, is a blessing and a curse at the same time.

A blessing, because it allows to expand into other verticals and a curse because it also deludes stronger communities within BUMPzee! and reduces the growth of them.

It is much harder now to promote BUMPZee to a specific vertical. Go to the homepage of BUMPzee! and tell me about the strong communities within the site. Do you see what I mean? You can’t tell?

I don’t mind having another platform out there. As I said in my comment at SEOMoz Andy was referring to: “The more the merrier I guess, at least does it provide choice and will cause each platform to develop further to the excitement of us users.”

I also said that you will use your position in the industry to promote your new service of course. Scott did so too with BUMPzee! There is nothing wrong with that I would have been surprised if you wouldn’t do it.

Not everybody here is agreeing with Andy’s assessment. You are not the only one :)

One of the things missing, and I have been told it will still happen is functional category filtering, which would improve things significantly.

I would then be able to launch my /wordpress community to monitor all the updates from plugin and theme developers.
I have had that community in “reserve” since the initial “beta” phase of additional managed communities was introduced, the no nofollow / dofollow community was an afterthought a couple of months later, initially intended to be run on a WordPress blog.

I gain a fair amount of exposure from Bumpzee purely because I promote Bumpzee extensively and the same may well become true of Sphinn.