Are you tired of seeing newsworthy stories on various topics of search engine marketing buried at popular social bookmarking site Digg, simply because the powers that be don’t care for the SEM community? Well now there is an alternative – BUMPzee, which is described as a niche blog aggregator with a community on top.
BUMPzee is organized into bite-sized communities into which they pull the latest relevant blog entries from around the Internet. Members of those communities keep up with the latest news, vote on the best stories, and discuss them, either here on BUMPzee or over at the blog itself.
This new social community site is the creation of affiliate marketing expert Scott Jangro, which started out as a list of affiliate marketing blogs in October 2006 but now has morphed into a Web 2.0 site. Unlike Digg, the topic of BUMPzee seems to be currently focused around affiliate marketing of which search engine marketing is included. It seems that they plan to keep it that way due to their limitations on accepting blogs that have nothing to do with either topic.
Adding your blog is quite easy. Simply create an account and add your blog(s), then join one or more communities and add your blog(s) there as well. Because BUMPzee works as a blog aggregator, any entry you post on your own blog will likewise show up there for other members to view, read and even vote on.
If you do not want your entries to show up, there is an option to display snippets or not. You can also exclude individual entries by including the following comment in the body of a blog entry – <–no_bumpzee–>.
Currently there are three communities with more planned for the future: Affiliate Marketing – for Affiliate Marketers, including affiliates and publishers, merchants and advertisers, as well as Affiliate Networks; SEO/SEM – for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals; and BUMPzee – news, discussion, feedback around the BUMPzee platform and service.
I have joined the SEO/SEM community using DavidWallace as my user name. I already see several fiends and colleagues have joined as well.
Additionally I noticed that they have a widget that is similar to the MyBlogLog widget. The BUMPzee widget will show top posts in the communities that you’ve joined and the recent visitors to your site.
You can also put a “bump this” button in your blog posts. Installing the widget has the added benefit of getting your blog’s comments tracked on BUMPzee. When configured properly on a WordPress or Moveable Type blog, the widget will report back comments info from your blog to let members know that there’s a discussion going on.
It seems like a cool concept but to tell you the truth my head is spinning just trying to keep up with all this social media/community stuff. I created a Twitter profile yesterday and now BUMPzee today. Still it is nice to something that combines the community aspects of sites such as MyBlogLog as well as social bookmarking features like Digg.
