The nominees this year are highly controversial, because they are inspired or originated from Matt’s own reading list, and are the posts which he highlighted in his monthly roundup posts as being the most important for his clients and subscribers to read if they missed them.
As such, the Semmys represent a subset of the content that is created, but possibly that also allows Matt to highlight articles that were in some way ground-breaking or were the centre of the news more than useful howto articles which might present excellent content, but are not necessarily “must read”. They are certainly going to be controversial…

Judging is broken down into 2 stages, with 25 judges being asked to come up with a short list of posts in their assigned categories. I am sure assigning judges was a hard task, because so many of the judges have their own articles nominated, and because of quite visible professional ties with other marketers.

The 25 Judges

• Aaron Wall
• Andrew Shortland
• Andy Beal
• Andy Beard
• Barry Schwartz
• Bill Slawski
• Brad Geddes
• Chris Winfield
• Christine Churchill
• David Mihm
• Deb Mastaler
• Eric Enge
• Jeff Quipp
• Jennifer Laycock
• John Andrews
• Lee Odden
• Lisa Barone
• Logoworks
• Loren Baker
• Matt McGee
• Michael Gray
• Rand Fishkin
• Simon Heseltine
• Stoney deGeyter
• Sugarrae
• Tamar Weinberg
• Todd Malicoat
• Vanessa Fox

The Articles I Had Nominated (yes 4 of them)

SEO Category
SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make
Google Category
Dancing With The Gevil – Defamed By Google?
Digg Favorites Slapped By Google
Blogs & Blogging
Optimizing HTML Links In The Aftermath Of A Blog Storm

For some reason none of my articles about Google and paid links were classed as rants, maybe I need to add some more attitude to those or keep them shorter.
In some ways that is a good thing, it has allowed me to be a judge for the Rant Category as well as SEO Tech

Take a look at those categories and let me know what you think – I will try not to let you sway my choices too much, but if you have a favorite, do let me know.

SEM Isn’t a Neglected Niche

PlugIM has been going reasonably well for quite a while
Bumpzee has lots of communities that are SEO / SEM / Marketing related

There are also a number of other marketing and blogging bookmarking and news sites that I have seen though didn’t seem to have quite as much traction.

Sure, SEO, SEM etc isn’t very popular on sites like Digg unless you have a very cultivated audience, and even then you have to have an insane amount of credibility in the the eyes of the general Digg population to stand a chance of not being buried.

So if it is not availability of suitable social networks for the topic maybe it is…

Sphinn is a Better Technology Platform?

Sphinn is running on Pligg

Well at least Sphinn is sometimes running on Pligg…

PlugIM is also running on Pligg, but from what I can see, other than cosmetic differences such as adding all your other social networks, and possibly “stalking” (I haven’t looked at that closely), the version of Pligg used by PlugIM is much more heavily customised.

This includes:-

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (though this isn’t collected from the content)

Categorization of content just doesn’t work – there is a big difference in SMO with the purpose of gaining links, and SMO with the aim to gather email or RSS subscribers for Direct Marketing.

Bumpzee on the other hand is a custom platform – it still has a few bugs, and quite a few features missing. If it received a similar amount of attention as Sphinn seems to be getting, I am sure the guys at Bumpzee would spend a huge amount more time on it rounding off the features.

Ultimately Bumpzee currently blows Pligg out of the water for features unless Pligg is heavily customised.

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (picked up automatically)
• Lots of Widgets
• Multiple interlinked communities

Sphinn has no technological advantage, in fact it might be looked on as inferior

Attention Wars

Lots of people in the SEM community have attacked Jason Calacanis for Mahalo his (in his own words) “viable Google co-exister”, and Guy Kawasaki for Truemors.

Danny Sullivan was one of the heavy detractors.

The only reason Sphinn might be successful is Danny Sullivan & Attention

Deja Vu anyone?

Hardly anyone in the SEM community would give a damn about Sphinn if it wasn’t launched by Danny. I have seen Pligg sites heavily criticised by many SEO/SEM specialists.

When Danny Sullivan announced Sphinn, he stated:-

By no means do we envision Sphinn as replacing general news sites like Digg. We just think the story submission model can work and be powerful in a specialized area such as search, as well.

By the way, we’re not the first to try this for search. In February 2006, The Search Engine Press was launched, then John Battelle kicked off SearchMob in September of that year. Since then, we’ve had others appear, including BUMPzee and ISEdb Scoop. We’re happy to join them!

That was actually only the second time Bumpzee had been mentioned on Search Engine Land.

I can only assume that Bumpzee wasn’t gaining exposure on influential SEO / SEM blogs because of some kind of disclosure problem, or not wanting to promote a future competitor, or a future competitor owned by a strategic business partner.

PlugIM has never been mentioned, though it does pick up Danny’s content from Search Engine Land.

At least Sphinn can’t be accused of copying some of the better features on PlugIM.

Critical Mass

Sphinn now exists, and will likely capture the attention of a large proportion of the SEM / SEO community, because ultimately most people involved in SEO / SEM in one way or another are attention and link whores.
Danny certainly has a fair amount of attention, and a lot of other people in the industry with attention are also promoting the site, at least a little.

It will continue to grow as long as Danny keeps driving traffic to it, but he is not even doing a very good job of that.
Guy Kawasaki leverages his own traffic to drive people to Truemors with an RSS feed above the fold on the front page.
Search Engine Land currently only has a link in the top right corner, and no voting buttons as standard.

I also noted that SEL has MyBlogLog removed. Does this mean they are going to try to make Sphinn more “social” with widgets as well?

Unfortunately Sphinn is a very category centric niche voting site – I don’t see it’s population growing beyond the aggregate subscriber base of Search Engine Land and SEOmoz.

Market Segmentation

With Sphinn, the guys from Search Engine Land are effectively claiming their own little kingdom in social news, unfortunately whilst it might be good for Danny to enhance his own attention, and maybe drive traffic to a number of sites that deserve some limelight (I have noticed Meg, Lyndon & Maki doing well), I am not sure this is such an ideal situation.

There are various groups of people involved in SEO / SEM who don’t even acknowledge that the others exist. The same is true of internet marketing and affiliate marketing.

Building Bridges

What was really needed was for existing services to be given some attention, which would have the effect of building bridges between communities.
A service promoted significantly by the SEO / SEM and affiliate / internet marketing community could gain critical mass for a news network that allowed content that was more commercially flavoured, and such a community would also attract casual users, linkerati, press and ultimately drive more traffic to good content.

The best option possible would have been to adopt something that already existed.

Not the Same As Blog Social Networks

In my opinion this is not the same as blog social networks, within which Bumpzee also fall, competing against Mybloglog and Blogcatalog.
In theory there are 75M bloggers, and I doubt there are many more than 200K actively interested in SEO / SEM enough to be involved with a social news site on the topics. It is only when you start merging with internet marketing, affiliate marketing and “make money online” that you start hitting the 1M+ audience that is easily possible.

Spinn Exists – Have to Use It

I am already giving Spinn as much promotion as Danny is himself, with a voting link on every page. I want the attention, but hopefully I can also divert some of that attention towards other services that are equally deserving.

The Alexa data is more for future reference as Sphinn has just plummeted after its launch and will take a while to gain traction.

Including 4 voting buttons on a page is dividing attention, although I have removed StumbleUpon because providing a button was reducing any “thumbs up” I might receive.
Ultimately, if I was to remove one of the 4, it would currently be Sphinn.

Giving Attention

It is honestly a shame that Danny and Search Engine Land took this direction. It would have been much better to promote the existing services extensively 4 months ago. By this time they would be booming, and drawing a much wider audience – such strategies have much stronger long term effects.

Of course it is not just Danny – Rand for instance didn’t even mention competing services in his post, and the first mention of the fact that it was running on Pligg rather than “the site itself has some fairly exceptional functionality” was by Carsten in the comments

When you share your audience with others, quite often you get it back in spades. Two posts in a row touching on reciprocity.

I would honestly much rather be bumping or plugging everyone’s posts than using Sphinn, because that would suggest growing cohesion within the industry, and not more splintering.

With that said, everyone interested in SEO and SEM should sign up with Sphinn, and also grab Michelle’s Sphinn plugin

• Memes – I use the Megite SEO Meme on a daily basis
• Search – I use Alister Cameron’s SEM SEO Search frequently, and he keeps it updated every week
• Toolbar – My Google Toolbar Button combines the Megite SEO Meme with Alister’s SEO Search

Lee has mentioned a good way to add a river of news. Why not take it a stage further and have the OPML used to power an SEO social network

The best possible way would be for all these sites to join the new Bumpzee community for SEO

Yes my SEO category for this blog is feeling lonely as it seems to be the only SEO content currently submitted – the new channel only launched yesterday.
The Affiliate Marketing channel has been running for some time, and is proving to be a huge success.

I use Google for a lot of searching every day, I am sure more than 95% of casual users. I am not talking about checking ranking, as things like that can be automated with Google’s APis and various tools. When I need to find information, I use Google Search.
I have seen Google suggest other related terms to try such as this, which appears at the bottom of a page when I search for “insurance”.
The Google Related terms normally look something like this:-

But I have never seen this search result configuration before.

Maybe I have been searching with my eyes closed, or not keeping up with the news

It seems Google is taking the top results for the search term entered, and then using some kind of LSI or related term to provide alternative results.

Here is a longer view, showing the 3 + 3 + X layout

Better Search Results?

In this particular search, the related results were probably equal to the results for the specific term. I am sure this will help casual searchers a lot in finding things they need.

The Long Tail: Low Hanging Fruit

This could be a disaster for niche marketing targeting low hanging fruit and niche terms with low competition. If you are not in the top 3 results for the long-tail search term, you are relegated to 7th place or lower.

Adwords – Give Me More Money

On this particular search, I didn’t see any advertising, but then I am in Poland not the US, and there is so much information on terms like this there isn’t much money to be made selling things.

However, if Google are going to be showing SERPs for more popular LSI related terms, it seems only logical that they are going to also add the advertising inventory.

This might affect 2 things

• Prices on niche terms increasing
• A need to pay even more attention to negative terms in Adwords

Hmm is this exclusive content, or am I a year out of date and need to take my blinkers off?

This one focuses on Google Toolbar buttons

The first button is ideal for anyone interested in SEO

It is a mashup of

Lee’s list of SEO | SEM blogs and websites

Alister Cameron’s S.E.O. | S.E.M Search Engine

Megite’s SEO | SEM Meme

Enjoy the SEO | SEM Google Toolbar Button