Reader-driven SearchMob is up and running, and many of you have already begun posting stories. Here are the top five vote getters so far:
A social news service for free advertising
Dirty trick to get inbound links from Slashdot.org
An Investment Approach to Marketing
deliSearch – feed your own search engine from delicious
Does valid markup affect search performance?
I’ve already learned a lot from this experiment, and will be working to improve the service over the week. Keep on posting, thanks!
Looks good John. I’ve been tinkering with this same app (it’s Pligg, right?) myself. It’s a wonderful application.
A couple of suggestions:
I’d like to see are a link to SearchMob on your front page navigation. 🙂
Also, it would be great if you could show the tag cloud (http://battellemedia.com/searchmob/tagcloud) either off of the SearchMob folder or on your home page.
Best / Rob
Needs an area for feedback/bugs. I came across a bug in the rss feed links which point to non-existant locations.
Otherwise, looks good. I’ll be perusing all three (this one, Search Engine Press, and SearchnSniff) via rss for the forseeable future.
John, I’m a bit lost as to the usefulness of SearchMob, at least within the context of this blog. I mean, it is a nice, search-focused, digg-like vertical. But the reason I love coming to this blog is not to find out what everyone else thinks is popular, but to be challenged by the thoughts and insights of a single editor.
I may be a bit of a Nick Carr on this, but durnit, I value the biases and insightful perspectives, the editorializations, that come from one person’s educated viewpoints more than I do the output of mob voting.
I know this probably puts me in the camp of folks that “don’t quite get it”. But I hope this SearchMob effort does not take away from your main blog.
Well JG, this is not an attempt to replace my editorial voice (or Melanie’s) but rather augment it. I get about 10-30 emails a day from folks suggesting stuff that might be posted to Searchblog. I can’t review it all, but I’m wagering the wisdom of the crowds can.
I have no idea if this will work, or even be useful, but I am hoping it will add to the conversation, rather than replace it.
I will admit a certain melancholy over how much work FM has been lately, doubled with the Web 2.0 conference, which is picking up a lot as we move into Fall. But I do know that in my heart of hearts, what I want to do is write and think about this world, and all that I’m doing…FM, Web 2, the book (it still takes time) … are a route to doing that more in the future. Thanks for your comment.
FYI: If you go in the Tag Clud and click one of the items, you get error messages.
Also, is the username supposed to take you somewhere? It appears to be a link, but does not seem to link to anything.
Not sure how useful this will be. It usually takes someone very active on a site like this to make it work, like Kevin Rose is at Digg, and if you John are feeling busier and busier . . . there may not be the glue to make it stick. But who knows . . . .
Hi John –
I just realized that you have all the info I mentioned in my earlier comment: tag cloud, Pligg info etc. on the right hand navigation.
But I’m using IE 6 and this section appears at the very bottom of the page. I just happened to be scrolling down and I saw it. 🙂