Our intrepid developer/sysadmin Mel Gray offered in an email thread today to help me build a screencast for Linkscape and I couldn't resist.

In the video, I walk through a relatively live (hence some wait times and even some unexpected data) demo of using the tool to find out more about the folks ranking well for the search phrase "camping gear" at Google. The video is about 12 minutes in length, but if you're curious about how we like to use the tool internally for basic analysis and competitive insight (as well as judging how particular sites might be achieving their rankings), this should be very worthwhile.

Let us know if you enjoy screencasts like these. They're not terribly hard to do (though Mel did spend a good number of hours editing, despite doing it all in one take), so perhaps they'd prove valuable for other tools and processes (both on and off SEOmoz). I'm thinking maybe a run-through of how to apply some of the advanced searches in Ann Smarty's guide would be really fun.

p.s. SEOmoz is doing some server shuffling tonight, so if you experience slowness or downtime, our apologies! We're trying to help make the site as speedy and consistent as possible.

p.p.s. If you want to watch the video in HD, you can do that on Vimeo (and it's a little bigger in size, too).