Someone, unnamed, asked me where I get my blogging ideas from. The person asked if it was from that Daily SearchCast. Honestly, I was a bit taken back from that.
Why? Well, all the topics discussed on the Daily SearchCast typically come from my research. I spend a good chunk of my time, compiling news, blog posts, images and forum threads on topics related to search. I then organize them in RustyBudget and we work of that for the news we post at Search Engine Land, the SearchCap and what goes into the Daily SearchCast.
That being said, I also want to keep the Search Engine Roundtable unique and have its own perspective. So how do I not let what I find via my research for Search Engine Land, interfere with my work and research for the Search Engine Roundtable. Although my system is not 100% foolproof, it tends to have worked very well for years.
Before doing my morning rush of reading my RSS subscriptions, as you can see, it spikes at about 8am. I always head to the forums first. Why do I go to the forums first? Well, I honestly don't want the "news" and "blogosphere" to interrupt my objectivity of what is important to the inner core of our industry. How do I determine what news or features or subjects are the most important to the industry? Like I said time and time again, and have written in the Search Engine Roundtable's purpose statement, I let the industry decide. By that I mean, I mine the search forums - look for the most discussed topics and then write about those topics based on the discussion. I do the forum research before the other research, so that I can avoid writing about something that honestly is not that important to the average SEM.
Let me show you a recent example... [heads off to find an example...] On April 11th, I covered news at Search Engine Land that Yahoo's new minimum bid formula will go live sometime this week. SEMs didn't really care for the news in the forum and there was no thread at that time. Today, at the Search Engine Roundtable, I finally wrote a story about it, five days later. Why today, because today is the first day SEMs and advertisers actually noticed a change in how Yahoo is actually determining the minimum bid. Yes, we warned advertisers that this was coming a few times months ago, only because the SEMs in the forums cared and had threads on it. But I did not cover last week's announcement, because advertisers were kind of sick of the warnings - they want to see if the quality changes they implemented will hurt them or not and today is that day for some.
Hope that clarifies a few things for my readers on how I differentiate between the Roundtable and the Land.
About a year ago, I wrote about being Slapped With Electric Bill For Past Four Years.
This is the April 30th, issue of a daily post that will contain links to commentary of the posts over at the 
