Posts from — March 2008

The piece I wrote about my Startup Weekend experience just went up… you can check it out at www.startupweekend.com. For those that came here from there (and are mad now)… sorry. Scroll down, and you’ll see some stuff you haven’t before. I promise!

Almost all copy these days is SEO (short for Search-Engine Optimization) - it seems like people can’t write an ‘about us’ section anymore without stuffing it full of keywords. I hate reading that stuff, and I especially hate writing it. Now… I don’t mean to bash all of SEO here – I can see how, for some projects, you’d want to use it. But if you’re developing new tech, your project isn’t one of those.

Why? Because new tech people will find good new tech. Andrew Hyde relayed a funny quote the other day: “marketing is punishment for a bad idea.” It’s a little flip, but for new tech, it fits. If your shit’s good enough, it’ll go viral - people won’t need to find it searching on google… they’ll find it on your blog, on twitter, on facebook, or even on the street.

And when they do – when people get to your site, they just want to see your app (and a bit of good copy). They don’t want to see what keywords a computer-generated writer spit out. They don’t even want to see marketing… they want to see who you are, what you made, and why you made it.

So, just go write this stuff free of limitations. If you still think you need SEO… you don’t. That just means your product stinks. In that case (even more so), don’t spend time on the keywords, spend time on the code.

I just got done with Startup Weekend (in Boulder), and the experience lit the fire for this blog - I got excited about new tech again, and saw that for a lot of developers, the quality of their copy is falling behind the quality of their product. They’re making cool stuff, but they’re not communicating how cool it really is. The value of good writing is being overlooked, and it’s just not being talked about… that’s what this blog is for. Hopefully, it’ll be helpful, and definitely, it’ll be fun. More to come soon.

But for now, seeing as Startup Weekend was my inspiration, I figured I’d drop a few links to those interested… check them out to see what went down (if you don’t know already):

I just wrote a piece about my Startup Weekend experience, and if all goes well, it should be up on the main site sometime soon.

Micah (a friend of Andrew’s and a BizDev for Lijit) did some good blogging on the live-site, and wrote down a few good things on his own blog.

Laura from mediacasters.tv rocked the weekend with a ton of live-content… not only recording what was going on, but making cool stuff happen too. Most of it is still up to see, so definitely go check it out.

And I’m sure there’s more. If Danny’s reading, it’d be great to get a link to some of his stuff in the comments section, but now… anybody else?