evilgreenmonkey

I’m sure that we’re all still in the morning stage after losing our beloved ThreadWatch, although there’s a new site in town - and I’m not just on the rebound!

Threadwatcher.com is a sparky new SEM/internet news portal launched by Earl Grey (Syndk8), which takes a lot of influences from Threadwatch and in my personal opinion, many from The Register as well. Now apart from SearchEngineWatch (like our new look?), Threadwatch and The Register were/are my top must-visits of the day. Combining them into one juicy SEO/internet geekfest is just, well… a dream come true. It’s not the busiest site in the world in terms of visitors, stories or comments at the moment, although it’s down to us as an industry to change that.

My only concerns:

1. Keeping content fresh and interesting requires a big commitment from the editors.
2. Although Threadwatch has always been “edgy”, Syndk8 is way beyond that. Threadwatcher.com may not need to appeal to the mainstream SEM industry, but at least has to be inviting to the typical ThreadWatch reader. Anyone who has read Syndk8 knows what the language and tone is like (which is fine for its audience), but I don’t think that such a writing style will go down well with Threadwatcher’s target audience.
3. No geeky gadget section! I’ll make the site my browser homepage if a gadget tab is added

Anyway, take a look, register your username on the site and have a browse around. I think you’ll grow to like it and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

It looks like that crafty Naylor guy has asked his blog readership to vote for him on the “Nicest Bloke In SEO” poll. I’m really lagging behind, which is not nice. If you’re one of the 5 people who read my ramblings here, vote for me now and you could win a date with The Lisa*!

* Lisa doesn’t know yet, although I’m sure she’ll be OK with me using her in this fashion

I picked the worst possible time to go on holiday, although my mate Dug and I have been planning a roadtrip around Ireland for a long time now and we’ve already put the date back twice. So we packed our bags and headed to Heathrow for a quick flight over to Dublin and an 11 day adventure. Oh, and to add to things, I resigned from PartyGaming on the day that my vacation began (to move into full-time SEO Consulting)! With the plan being to stick to the rural roads and try to stay away from popular tourist traps, getting internet access was not as easy as first imagined (there weren’t even any WiFi points to leach off!). I therefore had little time to keep up with industry news, which was actually quite daunting for a person such as myself. It seems that Jane is in the same situation as I was - don’t do it Jane!

The holiday was superb though; meeting the Kerry clan…

Re-creating the cover of one of my favourite books… can you guess what it is yet?

And drinking the black stuff of course!

While I was away, ThreadWatch closed its doors, which was not good at all. Although Aaron announced his intentions before my holiday, I was sure that a) It wasn’t just a link bait idea and b) someone would buy the rights and keep things flowing. So when I got home and discovered a page of stale news, I was mortified. If you’re wondering, I heard that Dave Pasternack and Jason Calcanis were to blame for the site closing - threatening to use clickbots on Aaron’s PPC campaigns and write a negative bio about him on Maholo ;).

I thought that JasonD planned to create a Threadwatch2 at w3wisdom.com, although the site seems to have disappeared.

The big chief also started a Threadwatch/Digg style extravaganza called Sphinn which I hadn’t spotted before. It allows you to submit new search industry stories like on Threadwatch and vote for other people’s stories like on Digg. I like how extensive the profile pages are, with lots of room to pimp out your blogs and contact details. I’m actually very keen on the site so far, which is very unusual for the grumpy old bastard that I am. Well done big chief, and I look forward to spamming (sorry, SMO’ing) it soon If you haven’t check it out yet, get in their fast before I hold all your usernames to ransom!

The SEO Chicks also raced ahead of us Blokes with a plethora of almost respectable articles, gaining some cred from Stuntdubl among others. I accept some of the responsibility for SEO-Blokes.com not keeping up with our female fatales, so I’ll try to start blogging again soon.

I don’t think that anything else major happened, not that I can mention here anyway. Maybe I’ve missed something over the last 2 weeks?

It will be hard for me to go without internet access for that long again, hopefully I’ll get a Blackberry soon for my email and RSS fix.