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- Sphinn It!
Andy Beard spoke out for the detractors in his post "Sphinn - SEM Attention Wars" which sparked emotional debate in his blog. Danny Sullivan, founder of Sphinn, jumped in for voluminous dialog which had emotional overtones in public, rare for Danny Sullivan. The dialog is totally fascinating…link-baiters debating link baiters for and about link baiting communities…chicken egg/egg chicken.
9 Comments
9 Comments


Comments
And, of course, the discussion here :) http://sphinn.com/story/1077
Yup, lets not forget the lively debate within Andy’s submission of the blog post the Sphinn thread itself, "Sphinn - SEM Attention Wars | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing." Thats actually what started the conversation. :) http://sphinn.com/story/1077
To be honest, I dont see what the problem is. Why cant Danny do his own thing? I dont get the argument against that.
Andy seems to be focusing on quibbles, though his POV is well-reasoned. Personally I think the benefits of Sphinn outweigh any supposed shortcomings. Hey, its already fostering a bucketload of interesting discussion.
Personally, I like Sphinn because of the new blogs and info I would likely have not found otherwise. If our blog gets some traffic/subscribers because of OMB content getting "Sphunn", fine - but thats ancillary.
I agree with Lee. There is a lot of value here. The initial shock of having ANOTHER writing commitment each day has worn off :)
Stretch - you might look on my views as quibbles, but the overall problem is that there are very few quibbles out there. In many ways if those were paid reviews, they would most certainly give the impression of the review being "required positive" Many people are a lot more diplomatic than me for various reasons, and in very extreme ways are conspicuous in their lack of coverage. I dont tend to coat things in sugar Lee it is going to be interesting how you differentiate your mashups based upon the Top Marketing Blogs
Just to be clear, Andy -- we didnt pay anyone to do reviews. Not sure if you were suggesting or implying that, but Ill clarify all the same. As for quibbles, Ive seen plenty of it. Fair to say perhaps Ive been monitoring the reviews more closely than you have? Theres been a lot of positive, generally flavored with a "looks promising, but well see." Then I can swing things over to where John Andrews has me and Rand conspiring to bring down Threadwatch: http://www.johnon.com/341/sphinn-spin.html Then apparently somehow in my spare time, Im also ordering Dave Naylor to launch a massive botnet attack on WebmasterWorld to stop it from my quest for global domination: http://www.johnon.com/348/seo-soap-operas.html That the type of extreme youre talking about? Had you even seen that? Of course, what John doesnt mention is that I also employ him to spin these things out so that I can point to him and say "see, its not all positive." Meanwhile, it just gets confusing. On the one hand, you write a post suggesting its a lovefest of positive reviews for Sphinn. Then above, apparently theres a conspicuous lack of coverage? Ill tell you the reviews that matter. The ones that I get here on the site itself. I have a bug list were working through, along with a wishlist of things people want. Ive got a site that gets the vast, vast majority of its traffic not off search engines (too new for that) and not off referral links (not a lot of people pointing) but instead off people themselves coming back to the site, to interact and share here. So Ill work to help make it a good site for that group (1,276 members to date).
Danny I wasnt implying that the reviews were paid for. As I mentioned in the comments on my blog, it is a very good marketing tactic to get people who are influential in a niche on-board as beta testers because they are more likely to write about your service, and they are less likely to write negative things in that review because they have been part of the development process. Most of the reviews on higher traffic blogs stated that they were beta testers. Some of those that didnt I am assuming at this time just forgot to mention it. I did read what John Andrews wrote, that was a little over the top.