Since it’s inception, I’ve thought that Sphinn was kind of ridiculous. Almost like it was created so internet marketers could have a place to promote themselves without worrying about the unfriendly crowds that exist on digg. This is totally unnecessary. Just because SEO news doesn’t do well on digg.com doesn’t mean there needs to be another social media site dedicated to seo and internet marketing! If you’re in internet marketing, it means that you’re at least a little bit narcissistic, and you don’t need a SM site to promote your articles on. If they’re good, they get read, and if they’re not good, and your name is big enough, they get read anyway. But alas, these are the top 5 reasons why I don’t like Sphinn:
- Internet marketers don’t need a central place for internet marketing news — Thats why we’re the marketers! People hire us because we are up to date on what’s new, and what’s not. (and because we’re good at what we do) It’s not like we’re not all reading each other’s blogs and obsessed with what Google’s doing anyway!
- Search Engine Land needs to open up comments — I can understand if Seth Godin wants to close comments on his blog, whatever dude, thats cool. But I just find it annoying that SEL has comments closed and they want everything to go through Sphinn. I don’t know how many times I would have commented on a post but then didn’t because I’m supposed to go to Sphinn. Open up comments already!
- Multiple submissions to the same article — I’ve had this happen to me a couple times, where other users submit my post to sphinn at the same time, and it gets posted twice. Then you get 2 listings, and it never goes anywhere because the ‘sphinns’ are divided. This is a basic functionality that needs addressing.
- Don’t send me sphinn links! — I hate it when im on twitter and someone posts a link to a new post or article, and I think I’m clicking a zi.ma or tinyurl link to the post, and i get taken to sphinn. We’re all marketers here, if you want a sphinn, put a sphinn link at the bottom of the post. I’m not gonna sphinn, or digg, or stumble anything until I actually see it!
- Lack of content — Besides the fact that anything that hits Sphinn is something that we have all already seen, or commented on, the front page keeps ‘hot’ content up for a week! There are plenty of things being posted daily to have fresh content on the homepage daily. Maybe a new algo needs to be worked out to figure out what makes it hot so that old articles don’t sit on the front page for days on end.
EDIT: Disclaimer: I must say that I do love the content that searchengineland.com puts out, and I think the people that run Sphinn are great. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several of them.
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I would disagree with #1. Why? Because there are a lot of marketers that market to marketers as their main target, and they need an outlet for their articles, tools, and ideas. Lots of marketers want to be known in the industry – so they submit stuff to Sphinn. Everybody else wants to know who and what is worth knowing – so to me, the idea of Sphinn isn’t so bad.
What I hate is the name, logo, and gear wheel icon…
But that is all coming from a designer – what do I know? Ballsy article man. I swear I commented on it when you first wrote it… Guess not.
Amen. I don’t need to sat much more than that.
Appreciate the info guys, thanks
Sphinn: a place where internet marketers who can’t be found online can be found by other internet marketers that can’t be found to the end that more internet marketers don’t get found because they’re in-breeding Sphinn.
Sphinn is a big SEO and internet marketing circle jerk.