During the weekend, most people have time to reflect, even tech bloggers. Ok, maybe not all tech bloggers, but those who aren’t that sleep-deprived have a few hours to think about the meaning of life and all that. So may I please claim 15 minutes or so from that time?
The thing is, I’ve stumbled upon a post by ReadWriteWeb’s Josh Catone in which he discusses the need of blog coverage for start-ups. He has come across a lifestreaming service called Mugshot. After some research he found out that Mugshot has been around for two years. He then wonders why FriendFeed has become so booming while Mugshot is still relatively unknown. The answer is, of course, blog coverage. FriendFeed is beloved by blogging giants as Arrington and Scoble, which geek wouldn’t want to follow them?
Yet this theory isn’t always true. Yahoo! Photos received less media attention than Flickr though it was bigger than the later acquired service. So here’s his conclusion:
It would appear that the tech blog echochamber has the potential to work against new services targeted at early adopters. If a new service relies on early adopters, it appears that it will only have a chance if it can get love from early adopter blogs.
It reminded me of a discussion we sometimes have here at the office about whether we should cover start-ups that don’t have any traction yet. You know the type: the only user generated content is from the founders and some friends. To write or not to write? I’m facing this dilemma every day and most of the times base my decision on the idea, UI, and design. Since even really early stage start-ups deserve attention if the quality is high enough.
What do you think? Do you consider it to be annoying when you come across start-ups here that don’t have any traction yet? Or do you think it’s interesting? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
The idea, the UI, the innovation, the stickiness are the factors that should be used to judge worthiness of coverage, IMO, not the stats, not the connections, not the investment, in fact investment should reduce the likelihood of coverage, not the reverse.
Although, human nature being what it is, whenever you’re at an event and someone mentions a lot of money has been (attained) by so and so, it captures everyones attention and they are all ears, ha!
The echo chamber of the Internet is different from the echo chamber of the classic channels because of the higher number of participants and the high speed of participation.
The number of good ideas that never see the light of day was, is and will always be huge. Simply because it didn’t reach that illusive tipping-point, for whatever reason.
But a thumbs up or down from Arrington and cohorts will potentially make or break your start-up. Because content of A-list bloggers resurfaces all over the blogosphere; reinforcing the message until it is so load it will drown any opposing sound.
And this is different from the classic situation where the number of potential influencers was much smaller and the audience was less (inter)connected. Less noise.
Make it a weekly series! Just 3 or 4 startups in one single post a week.
I read a bunch of Technology blogs, which often cover the same already popular start-ups. They are hardly breaking news. I would rather hear about new companies and ideas regardless of whether they have traction or not. Of course the idea has to have legs to begin with.
I remember when Techcrunch had ‘only’ 50.000 feed subscribers. Someone (don’t remember the author) described the effect where Techcrunch would write about a certain start-up, they would receive exactly 50.000 visitors but those visitors didn’t stick around. They called it the ‘how to get beyond the 50.000 techcrunch visitor wave’ or something like that. It IS cool to get a lot of visitors and a lot of coverage. But in the end you need a few people who love your service enough to get a few more people who in return will get a few more people until, you get it, a few million people use it. Publicity is good but a good service is better.
Ohm and to answer your question: I love reading about concepts and company in early stages. They give me a vision for what is next and a feeling that I get a chance to see the future unfold before my eyes.
I was happy to learn about Mugshot, and I was one of the “50,000 visitors” Boris Veldhuijzen van Zentem mentions. I want to the Mugshot site, looked around, read some of the help to get a better feel for what they can do, and left. They did not challenge the site at which I aggregate my online stuff, which is what Mugshot is also about. If they had been better for me than Second|Brain I would have thought about moving.
I like to see what is happening, and that includes sites that are just getting off the ground. What I do not like is reviews of sites that are in private beta — I cannot see them except, perhaps, a first page of glowing self promotion. I have given up on reading those posts. I figure I can wait until they go public and I can make an assessment myself.
Two points:
First, a question — what service do you use to extract tags from the comments? That seems like a good idea, and I think it is new — at least I do not remember seeing it before recently.
Second, it would be good if I could edit my comment even after I have submitted it. I made two typographical mistakes in the post above, and did not catch them until I reread the comment after submitting it. Since you know who I am it seems you might let me make a correction. And I will read my comments more carefully in the future.
Hi Bob, the service that generates the tags is commentag.com. It is a WordPress plugin and we love it too!
Making the comments editable is a great idea. I will look into it.
Bob: good news! I updated the blog so commenters can now edit their comments for up to 30 minutes. Give it a try!
To add something to the discussion. I know of some VCs who look at companies who are covered on blogs. Blogs are the way they find new leads and they use sophisticated tools for that. So in that sense, yes it is very important for startups to get covered.
How to do that….? Well, be where the bloggers are, at conferences or find out where they hang out and walk into that bar. But before you do that, make sure you have a great service, good UI and an excellent pitch. It is killing to get coverage before your product is out (I know from experience :) )
@Bob, good point about the private beta pages! It doesn’t really make sense if you can’t have a look yourself. I’ll keep that in mind and ask for invites more frequently.
Unfortunately, more than 30 minutes have passed since you changed editing capability. But I am sure i will make typographical mistakes in the future and will be able to take advantage of the 30 minute arrangement.
I gave it a try and it did not save properly after working at it for 7 or 8 minutes. So I am trying again.
Click to edit works well. It is easy to get started — though it is a bit surprising for the screen to go black.
I tried click to edit, but it did not save. I tried it twice and after 8 or 10 minutes it had not saved the changes…
Hi Bob, the changed are saved (I just added thee dots to your last comment) but it doesn’t acknowledge that right now. All I see is the ‘Saving…’ text. Weird bug which I hope to fix soon.
It is interesting to see the mechanics behind getting or not getting attention for your product or service in the press in general (blogs included). I think a large part is just about havind personal relationships with the writers.
Personally I much prefer reading about promising new stuff, instead of every brainfart of a Hyves, Google or whatever.
2kThank’s.9f I compleatly disagree with last post . hqi
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