[rbucks]

Valid points, but what Scripted does is not much different than hiring a blogger intern. To keep the content genuine, our clients have to be engaged. We simply promote them from writer to editor. Scripted helps businesses take the time spent from idea to publishing down from hours to minutes.

[alanctgardner2]

I can see this being useful in some circumstance, but I think the kinds of people who read HN value blog posts that aren't considered a chore. If you're offloading blog posts on someone junior, they're not going to be very interesting. At best they're meta analysis of what other, more invested writers have already said.

You're basically distilling a blog post down into a premise and high quality writing. A lot of what makes technical, corporate blogging effective is content and honesty, which are much harder to outsource.

[jbkring]

Totally agree. Which is why I wrote this post myself. I can only hope that my approach to the pain point felt 'honest', and that the content of my post was HN-worthy. We are absolutely not saying that you should outsource your entire social media presence. What we are saying is that consistency over time matters. If I wrote a post like this every day, Scripted would never ship another feature again. So I don't. I write a post like this every couple of weeks. But if we only posted every couple of weeks, a prospective client might show up to our blog, see that we hadn't posted anything recently, and think "I wonder whether they'll be as lackadaisical about customer service as they are about their blog". So we fill the gaps in our 'technical, corporate blog' with simple but engaging outsourced content. We allow you to 'set it and forget it', so that you only have to think about your blog when some crazy new topic pops into your head, and you can't control the urge to fervently hammer away at your typewriter.

[alanctgardner2]

I definitely understand that blogs can be ignored in favour of shipping. But I think a service like this would make me write to my blog even less, because it wouldn't feel urgent. Someone else has got it, and even if I write something brilliant, it'll get pushed off the front page in a couple days.

What would be more interesting to me is a proofing service where the content is entirely the actual owner's, but the voice and style are tuned by a professional writer. This would smooth out some idiosyncrasies (for better or worse) and make a corporate blog more approachable for customers, without compromising on quality. I imagine most people let their blog posts ferment for a few days, maybe weeks, before releasing them. Outsourcing the polishing and reflecting period would speed things up without cheapening the whole thing.

Having a small, paid audience of writers who also have a technical background to assess posts before they go out would be another way to take it.

Regardless, I suspect you guys will still kill it because there is a need for this in places where they would normally hire an intern to write the blog. Good luck!