Throughout its existence, the SEOmoz blog has always strived to be something very different from a Search Engine Land, Marketing Pilgrim or Search Engine Journal, by providing advice, insight, and under-the-radar stories from the world of search and webmastering. However, today's offer by Microsoft to buy Yahoo! brought plenty of text messages and emails asking what I think about the deal and when SEOmoz is going to write about it. This certainly isn't the first time, either.

So, I'll ask you, the people who matter most (thanks for reminding us, Rebecca); should V4 of SEOmoz (ETA - Q3 2008) devote attention to search industry news?

If we did it - this is how I'd personally like to address the issue:

• Build a new blog/feed for news
• Anyone can submit a news story
• Stories will contain a short (1-2 paragraph explanation of events) with links to the relevant, third-party posts on the subject - which could end up looking a lot like the feed from SELand, just a bit more diverse and narrowly focused
• SEOmoz employees will be responsible for ensuring that big stories (like today's) get submitted
• SEOmoz employees will have the exclusive power to "post" a story publicly to the blog/feed

There are many reasons why I'd use this format. First, I don't want to compete with what any of the major search news bloggers do. It's not our core competency. Second, I believe that user-generated voting on stories produces an unfavorable signal to noise ratio - if we cover news, I want it to be short, sweet, accurate and highly relevant pieces only. Digging through Sphinn, Reddit, Propeller or Digg, I find a ratio of approximately 5-10% of stories to be worthwhile and I'm unwilling to waste your time, as readers, with the noise. Besides, there's no reason to compete with Sphinn - it does an admirable job and perfectly fills the role of social voting portal in search.

So here's the vote - please give your honest opinion:

Feedback is greatly appreciated. I'm anxious to know whether the SEOmoz community wants us to help fill this need, or whether you all do as I do and rely on other sources quite happily. I'm also open to suggestions of how you'd like to see it implemented if you do indeed want SEOmoz to have a search news feed.

p.s. By popular demand, I may try to do a post on MS/Y!, but I've got three posts in my queue (on session IDs & cookies, why search engines want to count linkbait and another chapter for the beginner's guide) that I'd prefer to get to first.

p.p.s. Smartest coverage I've seen on the big story comes from Danny's Q+A with Microsoft and Aaron.