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Finally we get to speak a little about the new developments with We Build Pages :) Yum.
There are some more beans to come. But for Jill and anyother people wondering, there will be a new website/blog redesign with all new content and a description of our services and offerings. This will occur in the next two weeks or so.
Should maybe change the tagline of sphinn to...
"Sphinn - Internet marketing news and discusions (unless we don't agree)"
Wow. Lisa got negative votes for leaving a level headed comment? Weird.
My take is that the more user generated content sphinn can get outta people the better. To end a thread seems weird to me. If people do not wanna be invovled in it then they can just not add to the discussion. But if people want to continue a conversation then they should have a venue to do so.
In the future if the mods want to stop a discussion maybe they can link to a place where the conversation can go on.
My personal thoughts on this are mixed. I hate any situation where someone, deceivingly, takes advantage of another. I also hate when someone calls someone of a different knowlege level "stupid" or "an idiot".
In this case from my perspective you were just as decieving as you are alleging this other person to be. Perhaps more deceiving. You lied and toyed with this person more than they did with you. You did so with your own goals in mind, just as they did. The only difference between your actions and theirs is that they didn't insult you by calling you names. How can one deal with the situation would be a better question to ask I think.
Just a thought / perspective experiment Ciaran :) We all love Danny.
I am just saying we all were idiots before we learned something.
Story: Is Your Search Result Sexy?
This is an exotrodinarily excellent and useful post. I will link to it as a reference from feedthebot.
Thanks all!
YES I did leave Hawaii for this job.
I am living in Troy NY now, and I have been here since Monday. I have had a blast so far and there are great things ahead!
OOps, the video should be back up soon, I deleted it by mistake and had to upload it again to youtube. :)
You have agreat subject to dive into, and I think that Matt Cutts has a great idea (look at search engine perspective) and from the "flavor" of your recent mentions of the search engines vs privacy issues I think that your mind is already headed in the direction of why do search engines do what they do and why do we care.
I can't remember the exact thing you said (or where you said it) but it was a comment like "whats the big deal if public info is public? Oh I rememebr now, "street view/houses/redacted". you were saying that essentially there is public things that search engines offer that some people are offended by, why? That was an interesting topic and you are a great person to do it because you got the whole level perspective thing, which many of us don't have. I look forward to it.
My perspective on search engines and privacy is that the biggest danger ahead and the thing we will hear the most complaints from is the social graph. A great example of this is You Tube video sharing. I think that alot of people might turn that on not knowing what they are doing and then be horrified that others now know that they like like watch poodle sex videos or something. Many sites are starting to offer such public sharing type of things, and will result in some way as being represented in search engines, which are basically just a representation of the web.
Netfix too. You can share netflix on friendfeed. Would hate to see "Patrick Sexton just ordered "mutant teenage sex slaves" or even worse... "fried green tomatoes".
What is being shared and how it is being shared is the next big search engine issue imo.
I think it was a bad move to remove the article, but I also think it is unfortunate (but understandable) for Andy to give up on sphinn, because of it.
As the proud author of some of the more unpopular viewpoints on Sphinn, I was given a place to put my view points, even though they clearly would go against the grain of popular users.
That makes me think that sphinn is very legit.
However, by removing an article, you remove the capacity to be "a place for discussion".
Danny put everything back up, kudos.
Andy said something.
It was removed.
So much for a place for discussion, Andy has every right to me mad/hurt/whatever.
Maki offered a geat solution, remove voting from such things.
I offer another...
Make crystal clear what type of content will be removed, and be consistant in enforcing it.
As in any community, a member will feel hurt by things like this, the best way to minimize this is to have a consistant method.
A great example is SEOmoz, my community of choice. I have had (a few times) content I wrote removed. But I have never once felt hurt about it, because I agree with the removals. They made sense to me so there was no hurt.
In Andy's case however. It didn't make sense. Hence the hurt (or whatever).
It is very easy seen as...
You don't think it is worthy even though it was Maki submitting it, and you don't believe your community who voted it up, and you don't believe in Andy the author.
It was a judgement call that went bad, we all have made such judgement calls.
I don't see anyone being evil or bad here, I just see a place where things can be improved and tweaked.
Andy rocks. Wherever he goes (or stays) will benefit from it.
I once had to make a similiar decision. I was part of the Google webmaster group, and would spend hours everyday answering peoples questions. I really wasn't getting anything back from that community and I left it.
Any community builders must be able to, in some matter, make their members feel appreciated.
There is no quicker way to make someone feel unappreciated than to remove their content.
Evrytime you remove someones content, you are risking losing a member of that community (and potentially many others). When the person is a clearly valuable and remarkably active member, then you are REALLY rolling the dice.
I am humbled and appreciative to see that there are truly professionals running this.
This can best be illustrated by my article not making it to the fiinals :)
Hey! Wait a minute...
Rebecca's comics didn't make it????
wtf?
Wait. Okay. There is Lisa still there, I barely forgive you for removing SEOmoz comics now.
Way to go everyone. It is good that a situation like this, impossible to fix alone, can be fixed through community. It is really solid that GoDaddy responded like that and I wonder what if anything Google would have / could have done in this.
Story: Jim Boykin: Paid Links Aren’t Worth It To Me