Welcome Sphinn, Danny Sullivan’s new digg-like search engine discussion site.

Regular readers of Pandia know the story: Search engine guru Danny Sullivan decided to leave Search Engine Watch, the site he founded and edited for many years in order to start a new one: Search Engine Land.

Now he is taking this process one step further, announcing a new discussion forum, a sister site to Search Engine Land.

At its core the new Sphinn site will be a digg-like forum where users can suggest, vote on and discuss search engine relevant articles (cp. John Battelle’s SearchMob).

Readers will also be able to start their own discussions, which in practice makes this new forum a competitor to popular meeting places like Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums.

Launching new forums in a playing field with some many high quality arenas is very difficult, to say the least. However, if someone can make that happen, it is Danny Sullivan and his friends over at Search Engine Land, as they have the status and competences needed to make this happen. After all, Danny has done this before, with the Search Engine Watch Forums.

So what about the name? Here is Danny’s explanation:

Why Sphinn? We liked the idea of a place where marketers could put their own “spin” on news by commenting on stories or having discussions. But spin.com was taken, as was spinn.com and sphinnn.com was a N too far, we felt. So we went with sphinn.com, pronouncing it “sp-hinn.”

Sphinn FAQ