DISQUS

I think it's great that people are becoming more aware of the importance of public speaking. We try to encourage this by holding training and idea-sharing meetings twice every week and we get different people on our team to present on their learning and any ideas for innovation to different projects. We've found that this helps people to think their ideas through because teaching helps consolidation. Encouraging public speaking also falls in very well with the new direction our company is taking that everyone should think like a marketer first.

Hmm... I thought Google was evil when they did not allow advertisers to bid separately on their content network but they solved this a few years ago.

Now the content network performs beautifully for us. You just have to optimize the bids separately but it can do wonders to an online campaign.

However, Google has a few other tricks on how they suck money out of your pocket. I talk about them at www.TheComingAdWordsWar.com

Mike's last blog post..Simple vs Complex

Hmm.... this is news to me!

Now I am concerned. Can you please checkout the "Related Sites" section that I have in the footer of our SocialRank powered sites such as www.MarketingLens.com.

Are you saying they could get us into trouble? These links are not sold and not being offered for sale but your post got me worried that any link list might be deemed suspicious now.

What's your advice?

Excellent post and you are dead on! In fact, at our startup we are already launching startups within our startup to retain talent and motivate our employees. Our launch of www.SocialRank.com would be the first example and there are more on the way.

Mat - Correct, both TechMeme and SocialRank offer greater discover by helping people to rapidly see and discover the top stories of the day

Fagstein - It seems that you placed SocialRank into a different category simply because of the ad model. TechMeme also includes ads but the positioning looks different. I encourage you to take another look.

People do not seem to mind the ads on Google.com for example but just because we have added ads right away it seems that people are writing us off as a MFA site and we are very different. Perhaps something to think about on our end... I agree with you that unfortunately there are lots of MFA sites that provide no value but SocialRank is very different.

For example: Yesterday there were over 274 new blog posts on Internet Marketing by the leading marketing blogs. Want to know the top stories without reading through 274 blog posts? I do. Well, SocialRank can give you the answer and you can see it at www.MarketingLens.com. Without SocialRank you are stuck having to read through 274 posts.

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the feedback. We are still working out a few kinks in the system and if the overall feedback is that we should turn the pingbacks off, then we will most certainly do so. Our goal with SocialRank is to provide a great service by helping to make it far faster and easier to discover great content online.

Mike

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the feedback. We are still working out a few kinks in the system and if the overall feedback is that we should turn the pingbacks off, then we will most certainly do so. Our goal with SocialRank is to provide a great service by helping to make it far faster and easier to discover great content online.

Mike

In regards to your question:

Blogs that cover multiple niches may end up feeding into one of the niche sites with irrelevant content. For example, this blog is being listed on StartupSignal.com, but what happens when I write something not related to entrepreneurship that gets very popular? Will it show up too?

... the answer is it depends. If you write something popular that is not about entrepreneurship, then it would currently also show up on StartupSignal. However, we are starting to work on V2 of our algorithm and it will become smarter over time to be able to filter out content that is not relevant.

Thanks for participating and sharing your feedback!

Sorry to hear about the problems you encountered with BlinkList. The login problem you reported about has been solved. You can try again and you can even install the classic / traditional bookmarklet so this problem can never happen.

Thanks taking the time to write about some of the improvements on BlinkList! Just yesterday we changed the green smiley and now you can immediately see a small thumbnail of your friend that has also blinked the page. I wrote about it here:

http://tinyurl.com/y8n3an

In regards to the "view all friends" section. We used to have this on BlinkList a long time ago. Back then it was called "filter by friends" but we thought it would be much better to break it out separately.

You are definitely right that this is a very crowded space! We will just have to keep innovating and racing ahead. So far the progress, traction, and user adoption that we have seen has been great!

I would like to nominate www.BlinkList.com for category #3 (social news and social bookmarking). ;)

So you want me to pitch www.blinklist.com here? Come on, you know as well as I do that this is not a way to promote any website.

However, I have to agree with you that companies should also not try to flood your inbox. I guess this is one of the curses of being a blogger on the A list. You will get pitched all the time. Worse then flooding an inbox is to start bitching and moaning. I just wish people would focus more on delivering a quality product than to worry about who ends up writing about them or not.

Mike

Well, I hear you on your feedback. I would love to offer BlinkList integration with Flock but we are not there yet. We simply don't have enough resources to do everything and in terms of priorities this has not yet bubbled to the top although I do hope that in the future we will be able to offer a much more seamless integration with the leading browsers, including Flock.

Nice post Shri. I would have to agree with you that it seems everyone is just pointing at the great parts of Google and nobody is calling them out when they do bad. In the end, I think that hurts Google as much as their customers since many important issues won't trickle to the top. Still love the company and what they are doing but like any company, there is a lot they could be doing better.

Hi there. Are you in the Bay Area this week? I am visiting all the way from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia and would love to give you a demo of www.blinklist.com since you said that you also love to do demos of small websites. Would be great to catch up. Mike

Just to clarify, in the previous message it should say NOT instead of NOW when I was talkinga about the innovation on BlinkList. I guess I was typing a bit too fast. Rest assured lots more exciting enhhancements are on their way!

Hi there. Just so you know, we are definitely now slowing down the innovation on BlinkList. A lot of it happens under the hood and we have been very busy so I have not been able to update our blog as much as I should.

However, just this week we rolled out a new feature to "flag" users. As we continue to see rapid growth we have seen more spammers try to take advantage of our community and we are taking measure to keep BlinkList spam free.

We would also love to work with Flock but they have been slow on making it easy to integrate our service. We are definitely more than happy to help. As to not getting as much news coverage, I agree with you that I would love to see us mentioned more often, especially since we tend to score far better. I guess we still don't have a PR engine are still a tiny bit too small but I see that changing.

Hope you will stick with us. We are anything from bailing. In fact, we are working on some major new enhancements and innovations that we are super excited about! Right now one of our big constraints is resources but we are hiring and growing our team.

Great to hear that you are enjoying BlinkLife! We are just getting started so glad to hear that you are already enjoying the service!

We were a bi surprised to see all the coverage this morning and have been busy working away fixing bugs and adding improvements. If you have any suggestions please let us know. Hope you will continue to enjoy BlinkLife! :-)

Mike

Since you are checking out new social bookmarking sites, I thought you might also like to take a look at www.blinklist.com. If you do, I would love to hear your thoughts. Mike

You forgot to mention www.blinklist.com in your article. Perhaps you don't know about us yet but if you check us out, I hope you will agree and say that we are far more than yet another social bookmarking site. At least I hope you will. If you check it out, I would love to hear your thoughts. Mike

Als social bookmarking platform wollte ich www.blinklist.com vorschalgen. Die Seite hat was oder nicht?

Sweet! Welcome to the BlinkList community. I hope you will enjoy our service and if you come up with ideas or suggestions for improvements just let us know. Mike

Hier ist noch ein neuer service der Dir gefallen koennte. www.blinklist.com

Thanks for your honest and detailed review of BlinkList. We are excited to hear that you are overall very happy with our service and we have noted down all of the bug and usability issues that you have identified.

We are working hard at making BlinkList better and better. If you come up with new ideas for suggestions and improvements please pass those along.

Mike

PS: Every site will have a preview but our thumbnail engine needs some time to catch up.

I completely agree with you! I think that during a time of innovation you will see both brilliant ideas and some of the dumbest concepts. That is normal and to be expected. Personally, we are trying to boostrap our startup (www.blinklist.com) and work on it until it becomes successful.