Are We Dating Bloggers?
OK first let me clarify the title of this post. It’s not meant to ask if we’re going to the movies with the staff of TechCrunch or Gawker. The question refers to how we classify ourselves as bloggers.
Yesterday, the web’s #1 “#1 douchebag” (it’s true), Micah from Lijit, wrote a post titled “What Type of Blogger am I?“. In it, he examines how he would classify himself as a blogger citing other well known bloggers and their own self-classifications. His examples include Gary Vaynerchuck, a “wine video blogger”, and Robert Scoble, a “tech geek blogger”.
This got me thinking about what type of bloggers we are at Ignighter.
First of all we have to admit that the Ignighter Blog is our company blog. While LearntoDuck is Micah’s personal blog, he also writes frequently about what’s happening at his company on the Lijit blog. Similary, our friends at the Foundry Group frequently write Foundry related posts to the Foundry Group blog and general VC related posts to Ask the VC. But Seth, Jason, and the other guys all maintain their personal blogs to talk about whatever is on their mind, from their grandfather to their rock band.
We don’t have personal blogs (yet) for a couple of reasons:
1. Writing Time divided by Potential Readership equals Infinity If we were to calculate the amount of time that would go into writing our personal blogs in relation to the amount of people that would actually read them (probably just our parents, and even they would only read on occasion), it just doesn’t seem like the best use of our time right now.
2. Very few Non-Work Related Topics are on our Minds Right now we live and breathe Ignighter and startup culture in general. It is literally on our minds 24 hours a day (don’t pity us, we actually like it). Basically anything we want to blog about (for now at least) is, at most, tangentially related to our company. When we write about the future of Facebook apps, Facebook chat, or even a cross-country road trip involving Ignighter’s founders, to us that’s close enough.
What does all of this have to do with Micah’s post about having a blogging identity? I think I’m starting to ramble. Ignighter was out really late last night - market research.
The bottom line is that when we write our blog we try to reach a balance between what we think our friends and Ignighter users would be interested in reading and what we’re actually doing and talking about at Ignighter. Sometimes those topics correlate, but often times they don’t.
For example, we spent a lot of time in real life talking about our 3-year revenue projections. We realize that if we talked about revenue projections on the blog we’d either have our readers sleeping after the first sentence or leave them perplexed as to why we project 66% of our revenue coming from Russian mail order brides by Q3 of 2010. Either way, not a great blog post.
On the other hand, the posts still need to be relevant to Ignighter otherwise they really don’t belong on our company blog. I’d be perfectly happy recapping the Giants’ Super Bowl win everyday and my exuberance would keep them entertaining at least through August, but that really wouldn’t be appropriate.
So to bring it back to Micah’s question - and I think this is a fun exercise for any blogger - what kind of bloggers are we? We tend to write about group dating a lot so you could say we’re dating bloggers. But the truth is, we cover other topics too. Everything from asthma to calzones to goats - in fact with a little more dedication, we might be able to consider ourselves goat bloggers one day.
For now, I think I’ll call us “startup bloggers”. Pretty much everything we blog about, in one way or another relates to our startup or startups in general. We’re a young enough company with a small enough blog readership (80% of our readers under 5′7) that we can write about a wide range of topics we find interesting and relevant. This freedom may wane as we grow, and that would be a welcome sacrifice, but for now we’re happy blogging the way we want.
Are we dating bloggers? Only if they’re buying dinner.
Like this post? Continue to Ignighter.com, send it to a friend or check out these related posts:|
|