Posted on November 4th, 2007

binoclulars[Skip immediately to dailyCrawl] You can’t participate in a community without understanding it’s members. 1,360 personal Sphinns only begins to qualify someone to understand bloggers, their ways, and search marketing publications. As another small part of the SEM anthropology safari-quest, AIMCLEAR morning meetings regularly include a slide show crawl of well regarded search marketing blogs in the background on the conference room projector. We feel this practice keeps us a little more in touch with the identity of blog authors and what’s important to them, rather than stories skimmed from RSS headlines.

The dailyCrawl is not meant to be a big hairy-serious SEM invention, rather a simple background method for keeping our staff apprised as to the graphic and “feel” evolution of the SEM blogosphere. It makes a difference to us. The show always starts at a different blog so, by week’s end, we’ve seen them all with only a few minute’s investment each day.

Lost in the RSS Translation
RSS has revolutionized many of our lives with at-a-glance snapshots of minute to minute blog activity and it’s one primary method for seeking content. Most popular feed readers even allow for expanding headlines to read stories inline. However, like the long-vanished 33 RPM LP album (anyone remember those) 🙂 the “big” visual experienced has been lost in favor of technology. We’re sharing this little tool with the SEM community just for fun. Please don’t hesitate to recommend blogs for inclusion. Here’s the link for our dailyCrawl tool. (Tip: Log out of myBlogLog if you don’t want your badge to be left behind on blogs visited).

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  • Adam Taylor

    Well that was quite overwhelming.. Is it possible to provide a list of the blogs in the slide show? There were quite a few I’ve not seen before I’d like to check out properly.

  • Andy Beard

    I have actually noticed this in my stats over the last couple of days.

    A couple of things to be careful of

    1. Some blogs run code to break out of frames
    2. It is a little naughty on the ad servers, because they would look on these as artificial page views.

    It is effectively the same as a private autosurf script

    These things don’t affect me, but then I don’t run Adsense

  • Marty Weintraub

    Andy, Thanks as always for stopping by. You would have noticed it in previous weeks had we not blocked the referral at the browser level prior.

    1 We checked every blog in the DB and removed any which have frame-buster code.

    2 There’s nothing artificial of our use of this crawl. It only saves our typing in the URL or clicking on a bookmark facilitating dialog at the same time. It helps our team multi-task in the mornings. It’s an honest tool SO the ad servers will just have to figure it out.

    We’re adding a link to request blog removal from the crawl, which we will happily honor for any blogs who don’t like it. There’s no need for anyone to block the site. We just won’t look your blogs in our morning meeting. 🙂

    …and yes it is an autosurf script…and it’s not private 🙂

  • Derek

    Marty, I think this is a great resource to keep current on the top blogs in the industry. As you mentioned, using an RSS reader makes it very easy to miss the visual experience of a blog and I really do think there is a good deal of value to be found there.

    I’ve been trying to use this crawl when I have a little bit of down time at work. It prevents my RSS reader from being swamped with feeds but still gives me a snapshot overview of what is taking place at a variety of blogs.

    Thanks for sharing!

  • Marty Weintraub

    I like it that way too Derek. I just sort of run it all day and stop to read posts as they appeal to me.

  • Scott Clark

    Finally, a way to read blogs and still hold onto my coffee. Marty, let’s talk about creating a text to speech version of this so we get a SEO blog radio station.

  • Marty Weintraub

    What a wonderful idea Scott.

  • Rob

    Nice idea Marty. Anything that helps keep one in touch with who is saying what and where with the added benefit of it being filtered by someone who knows what’s worth reading is always a good thing in my book.

    Cheers

    Rob