Show HN: Our first startup attempt: blogging without a blog

http://www.insideword.com/

by akligman • 15 years ago

11 25 15 years ago

akligman9• 15 years ago

So the three of us are trying to quit our finance jobs and get into startups. Man.. that would be nice...

None of us are bloggers, so we wanted to build something where we could post ad hoc content without having to create/build/maintain a blog. FB is not really meant for article-length content.

InsideWord is kind of a mix between citizen journalism sites and, I guess, blogging platforms - at least, that’s what we think it is. We could definitely use some feedback and advice.

anony1212• 15 years ago

>> So the three of us are trying to quit our finance jobs and get into startups.

bubble :-)

shadowpwner• 15 years ago

What's the incentive for people to contribute? It seems that it'll quickly turn into something like Associated Content.

akligman9• 15 years ago

We've definitely studied AC. In our case, we're not telling anyone what to write about or incentivizing them by paying them (i.e., trying not to be a content farm here).

Users simply write about their interests like on any blog. The idea is to aggregate and promote the best content. We'll direct traffic back to their site via URLs on their profile, customization, etc

corin_2• 15 years ago

What plans do you have in place to prevent the site from (if it becomes popular) being a place where most content is written by SEO copywriters who discover it's a great place to get links?

troymc• 15 years ago

How is this any different from the wordpress.com homepage, where they highlight some of the better recent wordpress.com blog posts?

talbina2• 15 years ago

Do you think that business/science/technology writers who have valuable information and insight are finding obstacles to getting published online?

akligman9• 15 years ago

There aren't really obstacles, you're right. I know there are sites out there, but I guess I'm just lazy to find them. By centralizing some of the content, it may be easier to find.

I think IW is also geared more towards the novice blogger, who simply has a blogger or wordpress site with little traffic. By syncing it to IW, it should generate more exposure.

talbina2• 15 years ago

How are you going to stop spam?

akligman9• 15 years ago

We actually met a VC at SXSW this year who asked the same thing. We have a ranking algo - rying to avoid spam the same way Reddit does by only getting the best content promoted. We're thinking of building tools so users accounts time out or a captcha generates if they post too much.

pan69• 15 years ago

You could start by hooking into Mollom for the time being (mollom.com)

staunch• 15 years ago

You probably want to add rel="nofollow" to links until the post has been validated/upvoted enough or something.

mblomquist4• 15 years ago

Yeah, we were planning in using some of StackOverflows reputation based logic as well, so that will help a lot.

kqueue• 15 years ago

Most of the articles are copied from somewhere else.

http://www.insideword.com/member/profile/31 ->

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-04/compu...

Solving the original content problem is a must.

akligman9• 15 years ago

We filled in a few for demo purposes.. will be deleted :)

nedwin• 15 years ago

I really like the "I want to read / I want to write" UI element. Is that something you guys came up with or discovered somewhere else?

akligman9• 15 years ago

Thx, We actually found it on another site (can't remember which one - too many bookmarks!), but it was a tutorial slider. We just thought the idea was cool and recoded it from scratch with jquery. Stupid thing won't work on an iPad yet...

farout• 15 years ago

is it the jquery will not work or the app using UISlider will not work on the iPad?

Show HN: Our first startup attempt: blogging without a blog

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