Well, Aaron said he was going to shut it down today, but has been curiously quiet all week - in fact he hasn’t posted since the announcement. Many are speculating that the web’s best SEO discussion group is finished.
Lots of people commenting in the thread, lots of appeals to reconsider, to sell, to put JasonD at the helm etc - but no word from Aaron.
Some say it’s just a link-bait kind of exercise - others say its the end of an era - guess all will be revealed later…
One of the few remaining SEO / SEM discussion sites is to close on Friday.
Owner Aaron Wall, he of SEO Book fame, has announced that he is closing the site, citing spamming as one of the reasons for this - from Aaron’s announcement, “What was awful though was when I invited a few friends to become editors here and they spammed the sh*t out of Threadwatch.”
I have followed Threadwatch from day one, in fact I think I was the first person, after NickW (the founder) to join - and I have to say that it had run its course. In truth, I feel it only had a limited lifespan anyway, Nick threw all his heart, soul and time into the project, but didn’t think the business model through, in fact I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
Having said that, I thank Nick and Aaron for their efforts over the last few years, I would call in every time I went on the web - now, the question is, where will the gang gather next? Or is it the end of an era? As Aaron said, we’ve all got our own blogs to express our views now, and there are only so many hours in the day…
After posting this picture (taken at SES London a couple of years ago) on Facebook recently, friends gently took the mickey (most are considerably younger than I) and it gave me the idea for a caption contest. Just a bit of fun for anyone with too much time on their hands 
BTW - that’s me in the middle
I noticed Ask sponsoring ads last night on tv before and after the commercial breaks in a new ITV drama - the interesting bit is the demographic they are targeting…
The program in question is Talk to Me, starring Max Beesley, a fluffy piece of thirty or forty something drama - a sort of cross between Richard Curtis’ Islington trendies and This Life. Very popular with the ladies, this campaign is consolidating the old Ask Jeeves tv ads of a couple of years ago. It was said at the time that although Ask had only a very small percentage of search, it did, however, appeal to the female audience and also that the searches converted well.
I personally preferred the old Ask Jeeves ads and was disappointed when Diller rebranded the search engine as Ask, certainly in the UK. Was Jeeves the butler a bit corny? Yes! But endearing in a hard to believe kind of way.
I can’t see it impacting on the mighty Google, but at least someone is doing something.
Dont want to spend a lot of time on this but.. heard about Mahalo? A new search engine thingy powered by people.
One would think, being involved with the search engine industry, that Jason Calacanis, the man behind Mahalo, would have learned a little from Google, you know the company, billionaire creating, top-performing web company that changed the face of information retrieval so completely its name has become a byword for search?
Google’s recipe - Automate it and make it scaleable
Mahalo’s recipe - Do it all by hand
Apparently Mahalo is Hawaiian for thank you - Mahalo is also myspeak for a right load of old tosh.
’nuff said.
