MSN Search Eats At The Blogs Table
During the lunch break at Search Engine Strategies New York this year Danny Sullivan and JupiterMedia decided to turn lunch into an optional networking session with its Birds of a Feather Eat Together section. I picked up my ham sandwich lunchbox and noticed that among the paid search, search engine optimization, linking, and retailers tables that there were also two tables labeled Blogs. As a Search Engine News blogger and owner of the Blog Search Engine, I figured that this would be a great place to sit.
There were eight seats at the table, some people interested in blogs where sitting there, two bloggers from some new New York blog, someone from American Express, and three members of the MSN Search team. As we all made our introductions and engaged in small conversations about blogging, I noticed that the MSN Search programmers were really interested in listening to blogger experiences, RSS feeds, blog search, rankings in Google, and advertising in blogs. Also interesting (and I do not think this was a blatant PR attempt) was that they continued to talk about and list the features of MSN Spaces – the new MSN Blogging community.
To answer some of my questions about MSN Search and its future plans, the MSN members confirmed that MSN is planning on rolling out its own automated paid search management package this year and also stated that although blog search is in the making, they currently do not have a plan to launch anything anytime soon.
I struck up a conversation with them about advertising in blogs and Mitch Wyle, the Engineering Manager at MSN and a pretty nice guy, gave me the example of his son’s Runescape Online Gaming blog. Apparently Mitch’s son’s Runescape army is the third largest on the Internet and his son’s blog has become extremely popular. We all agreed that BlogAds (Henry Copeland’s Blog Advertising Network) would be more useful for his son’s blog than Google AdSense for selling advertising – mainly because he wanted control of what advertisements would be served on his son’s blog and Google AdSense shows the most relevant advertising results for a blog entry’s content, and not always the blog itself.
I’ve noticed that MSN Search has been very visible during the first day of Search Engine Strategies by having representatives asking questions during the sessions and conversing with the normal crowd. Great job MSN! Thanks for the lunchtime conversation.
