“Right round like a record, baby”
From the Search Sultan who brought you Search Engine Land comes: Sphinn (pronounced ’spin’), the newest social site for search and interactive marketers. Think of it as the area underneath the Facebook bleachers where all the geeks and misfits congregate to talk about what’s really going on throughout the web while looking generally standoffish.
The site itself serves as a great playground for random information, news and tips from a variety of SEM bloggers that you might not find on your RSS feed. Unlike other professional posting sites I’ve seen, this site is definitely of help to the optimization linking process. Instead of simply posting random nuggets of info, the site links to the users’ blog. Not that a single or twenty links is guaranteed to boost your site’s rank in Google, it’s still nice to know Sphinn is thinking like their target audience.
One of Sphinn’s features that I love, and initially works great for social sites, is the lack of censorship. However with professional sites such as this, lack of censorship inevitably leads to some users piloting the site as their own personal promotional vehicle. For example, while I’m confident that the user “Ms. Latina” can introduce me to a new level of SEO, I’d rather her enlighten me with something new and thought provoking from the SEM world. However the creator of Sphinn, Danny Sullivan, stated on Searchcast.com that there could be a possibility of a voting system that can be overridden if someone manipulates the site too hard.
Speaking of Danny, kudos to Sphinn’s tech support. I ran into a minor SNAFU while sphinning my first post, and after a few short hours Danny was nice enough to email me back saying he had corrected my mistake. What a guy, what a site. Finally, a place of solitude away from all the Myspace jocks.
