One of the most common requests from our 2010 member survey earlier this year was to bring discussions back to Sphinn. We did that when Sphinn 3.0 launched a month ago.

The ability to start a conversation with other members, without having to submit a story/article link, is something we want to encourage. Twitter and Facebook are cool and all that, but they both have serious limitations when it comes to having a real discussions that can be seen by more than just your friends and isn’t limited to short text replies.

Starting today, we’re launching a new feature to take advantage of Sphinn’s discussion tool. We’re calling it the Discussion of the Week, or DOTW for short. Every Wednesday, one of our editors will post the discussion topic and invite our users to join the conversation. Our first DOTW has just been posted on the home page:

DOTW: Do you think no-follow links are worth more than Google says?

Feel free to jump in with your thoughts on that one.

By the way, if you have ideas for future DOTW topics, feel free to use the same “tip @sphinn” messaging on Twitter that we announced for news tips last week. And if you want to start your own discussion (any day of the week), feel free to use the Start A Discussion tab up top.

We’ve been promoting the best and most popular Sphinn stories over on Search Engine Land since the beginning of August. I write a weekly recap each Monday, and those recaps have evolved in just a couple months from a simple list of stories that reached Sphinn’s home page to a fuller look at all Sphinn activity.

Starting with today’s Sphinn recap over on SEL, we’re now including a Comment of the Week — this will be a comment posted on Sphinn by one of our members that we feel is worth highlighting. It might be something we choose because the comment was intelligent, funny, challenging, insightful, or noteworthy for some other reason. We may not necessarily agree with the comment, but that’s okay; we’re all in favor of a healthy debate and a variety of opinions is always welcome.

The bottom line: We want to encourage more commenting and reward those who do.

The “Comment of the Week” feature is in addition to the breakdown in those recaps of which Sphinn stories had the most comments and were shared on Twitter the most. We think it’s a good overview of the previous week’s Sphinn activity, and we’ll continue to evolve those recaps in the future.

Thanks to all of our registered Sphinn members. If you have something to say about one of the stories here in Sphinn, don’t hold back. And one last tip: Update your Sphinn profiles to include your company name/URL.

- Matt

Starting today, you can now submit a news tip to Sphinn via Twitter. You’re proably already using Twitter to share great links with your friends and peers, so why not make sure the Sphinn staff sees them, too?

Here’s how: When sharing a great link, just add

tip @sphinn

in your tweet, and it’ll show up in the “mentions” list of Sphinn’s Twitter account. You can also use tip @sphinn to submit discussion ideas, too.

Our staff of editors will be keeping an eye on the incoming tweets during the day and, if we agree that the content is great, we’ll add it into the Sphinn story system manually — you don’t need to do anything else. Just put tip @sphinn in your tweet. It’s that easy. (Of course, if you want to write your own article description or headline, you’ll need to submit the tip yourself.)

Why are we doing this?

1.) We want to make it as easy as possible for the entire Internet marketing community to submit news tips to Sphinn — even if they’re not regular Sphinn users.

2.) This makes Sphinn more useful to all Internet marketers — no registration is required to read Sphinn and no registration is required to submit news tips to Sphinn.

3.) We want to make sure we’re seeing the best content out there for possible publishing on our home page, not just content from people who have Sphinn accounts and have the time to submit manually.

In short, this is about being inclusive of all Internet marketers and not limiting one of Sphinn’s primary functions just to our registered members.

We hope you find this useful and look forward to getting your news tips via Twitter. (Remember you can also follow our Twitter account to get tweets when new content is published on our home page.)

To keep things cohesive, let’s have any comments/questions about this posted over on the Sphinn story page. Thanks.