3 ms·

Warning: This is a little off-topic. This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies. However, I want to point out that this post is a

Warning: This is a little off-topic. This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies. However, I want to point out that this post is a classic example of what annoys me about so many startups' blogs: 1. What is blekko? I've never heard of it, and there's not a clear link to the homepage in the post, only to the results pages, which still doesn't tell me a lot... 2. What is skrentablog? What does that mean? Who is skrenta? Why am I not on blekko's blog? 3. What the hell are "auto-fired slashtag categories"? Now, I can click around and figure all this out, but I doubt many people will. I'm sure I'm guilty of doing this too, but it might be worth it to take a beat when writing our blog posts and remember that most users who hit your page have no idea who you are, what you do, and they probably don't really care much.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
I do wonder about this when writing posts. On the one hand, your audience generally knows this stuff (in this case Skrenta is blekko's CEO). On the other hand, an announcement post is likely to venture beyond your audience, so it is a balance. I tried to make this more clear in my post on the same subject, http://ye.gg/blekko http://ye.gg/blekko -- I wonder how good a job you think I did?
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I think your first paragraph is right on, even just a few words of context is very helpful. On the other hand, I do look at both DDG and blekko and wonder why neither of your companies have a blog of their own. Just makes things more confusing and feels slightly...hobbyish? That's maybe not the right way to put it, but maybe you get the idea.
  - epi0Bauqu 16y ago
    DDG did have a blog, but I decided at the start of the year to consolidate them into my personal blog. There were a number of things that led to that decision but paramount among them was that I think post frequency is key and I didn't have enough time (or ideas) to do both well. So I picked the personal one. This also fits better for DuckDuckGo since I am a solo founder. But it is still lacking in certain ways, as you are pointing out. To that end, there is a company Faebook/Twitter feed as well as a monthly newsletter. Eventually there could be a blog again.
  - jsrfded 16y ago
    We had the same debate at blekko. We nearly set up a blog.blekko.com, but corporate blogs can get so boring and impersonal. Writing on skrenta.com as the ceo of blekko helps me keep the tone more direct and avoid simply pushing the businesswire release out. In some of my recent posts I've tried to tell stories about projects we did around the launch. Sure, you can do that on a corporate blog too. But something about them, maybe the multiple authorship, or the fact that it is a company blogging and not an individual...I don't know, I don't tend to read a lot of corp blogs.
    - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
      I know what you mean, but there are definitely examples of this done well. Though I don't always agree with their message, 37signals does this nicely. It's always clear to me who is writing and each person seems to have a unique voice.
jsrfded 16y ago
Really good feedback - thank you. You would think I would actually link to blekko.com in my post about our new partnership. The post could definitely have used some more expository material about who we are and what we're doing. That stuff gets added by default to the press release, but I assume skrenta.com has a pretty niche audience and that anyone on my blog already knows who I am and what we're doing....bad assumption obviously and I'll take that into account for future posts.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  Hope I wasn't too harsh; I make this mistake myself. You're probably right about your blog audience knowing what you're talking about, but then stuff gets posted here or linked to from DDG and those people may not have any idea.

epi0Bauqu 16y ago

I do wonder about this when writing posts. On the one hand, your audience generally knows this stuff (in this case Skrenta is blekko's CEO). On the other hand, an announcement post is likely to venture beyond your audience, so it is a balance. I tried to make this more clear in my post on the same subject, http://ye.gg/blekko http://ye.gg/blekko -- I wonder how good a job you think I did?

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
I think your first paragraph is right on, even just a few words of context is very helpful. On the other hand, I do look at both DDG and blekko and wonder why neither of your companies have a blog of their own. Just makes things more confusing and feels slightly...hobbyish? That's maybe not the right way to put it, but maybe you get the idea.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  DDG did have a blog, but I decided at the start of the year to consolidate them into my personal blog. There were a number of things that led to that decision but paramount among them was that I think post frequency is key and I didn't have enough time (or ideas) to do both well. So I picked the personal one. This also fits better for DuckDuckGo since I am a solo founder. But it is still lacking in certain ways, as you are pointing out. To that end, there is a company Faebook/Twitter feed as well as a monthly newsletter. Eventually there could be a blog again.
- jsrfded 16y ago
  We had the same debate at blekko. We nearly set up a blog.blekko.com, but corporate blogs can get so boring and impersonal. Writing on skrenta.com as the ceo of blekko helps me keep the tone more direct and avoid simply pushing the businesswire release out. In some of my recent posts I've tried to tell stories about projects we did around the launch. Sure, you can do that on a corporate blog too. But something about them, maybe the multiple authorship, or the fact that it is a company blogging and not an individual...I don't know, I don't tend to read a lot of corp blogs.
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I know what you mean, but there are definitely examples of this done well. Though I don't always agree with their message, 37signals does this nicely. It's always clear to me who is writing and each person seems to have a unique voice.

jsrfded 16y ago

Really good feedback - thank you. You would think I would actually link to blekko.com in my post about our new partnership. The post could definitely have used some more expository material about who we are and what we're doing. That stuff gets added by default to the press release, but I assume skrenta.com has a pretty niche audience and that anyone on my blog already knows who I am and what we're doing....bad assumption obviously and I'll take that into account for future posts.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
Hope I wasn't too harsh; I make this mistake myself. You're probably right about your blog audience knowing what you're talking about, but then stuff gets posted here or linked to from DDG and those people may not have any idea.