Did you ever wonder how do we come up with the blog posts that make the homepage of Seattle 2.0? The fact is that there is absolutely no editorial control. We don’t have a team of people (or even 1/10 of a person) who goes around the blogs in Seattle finding what’s good and selecting it. It’s all 100% automated and your blog posts could be there too, in front of 10,000 visitors every month.

If your blog was never featured on our Homepage, there’s probably a reason: You are not on the Seattle Blogs directory on Seattle 2.0. If your blog is from or about startup or entrepreneurship and from Western Washington, we are more than happy to list you on the Seattle 2.0 Blogs directory – you can submit your blog here. Once we start parsing your blog, you might show up on the homepage in just a few hours. But wait, there is a trick...

The trick for your blog posts to appear on the Seattle 2.0 homepage is to write relevant blog posts about technology startups and/or entrepreneurship. We have an algorithm that ranks each blog post as well as a 12-week weighted average of your posts. The more consistent you are in writing blog posts – let’s say, once a week – and the more relevant the posts are about startups/entrepreneurship, the higher your position on the homepage and the longer your post will be there.

Then, based on that algorithm and on what the readers of Seattle 2.0 Like/Dislike, your blog post might go into our “Must-Read Blog Posts of the Week” and attract even more readers to visit your website.

We know that getting started with a new blog is hard, particularly when you write good posts and Google Analytics tells you’ve got only 20 visitors. But if you are consistent and relevant to what we care, we’ll have you quickly jump from tens of readers, to hundreds and even thousands of readers.

Not sure how to get started blogging? Read this post I wrote about a year ago: Finding Your Blogging Voice.

Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person.

Today we recommend:

	Brad Hefta-Gaub (@ZappoMan) brad.sweat365.com Fat Kid turned Ironman. Punk turned Record Mogul turned Mad Scientist Developer turned CTO turned CEO. Founder Sweat365.com. Seattle internet entrepreneur.
	T.A. McCann (@tamccann) tamccann.blogspot.com Founder and CEO of Gist.com
	David Aronchick (@aronchick) ironyuppie.com Founder and CEO of @Entertonement

Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.

Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle:

• 2/9/2010 - Seattle
  FounderDating
  
  
• 2/9/2010 - Seattle
  Agile Open Conference 2010
  
  
• 2/9/2010 - Seattle
  Seattle Startups Open Coffee
  
  
• 2/10/2010 - Seattle
  Seattle Lean Coffee
  
  
• 2/10/2010 - Redmond
  Eastside Startups Open Coffee
  
  
• 2/11/2010 - Seattle
  Legal Issues for Start-Ups with Matthew Forkner
  
  
• 2/11/2010 - Seattle
  Hops & Chops Happy Hour
  
  
• 2/17/2010 - Bellevue
  TechFoam: Eastside Startup Meetup
  
  
• 2/24/2010 - Bellevue
  Developing a Market Strategy for INDIA - Explore, Extend, Expand, or Exit!
  
  
• 2/25/2010 - Seattle
  Bootstrapping with Steve McCracken
  
  

More Startup Events in Seattle...

List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week:

My first venture, Sampa, closed its doors in August of last year. Since then, I’ve been forcing myself into figuring out what’s next. Taking care of Seattle 2.0 can consume quite a bit of hours from my day, but I’m a technology guy and I want to solve bigger problems in the world. Then, how do you find good ideas?

Josh Petersen of 43 Things gave a great talk on the topic of finding good ideas at the StartupDay 2009.

Over the last 4 months or so, it became clear to me that most entrepreneurs, including myself, create a business out of a personal problem followed by a great idea on how to solve it and then we just fall in love with the solution and said solution becomes the goal, not solving the problem anymore. Got it?

There is a big difference between a startup that’s trying to create a photo-sharing site and a startup that wants to help people share stories through pictures. Most startup might start as a problem-focused but they quickly become solution without a purpose.

For the last 6 months I’ve been “pitching” friends, entrepreneurs, investors, ex-coworkers on ideas for my next startup, seeking their feedback. A couple of months ago I told Andy Sack about one solution for an untapped market and he’s response was basically that he believes on the problem, but he wasn’t sure the solution was right. Paraphrasing it: “This can be the right solution or not, I don’t know”. That statement opened a door in my brain to think more broadly about the problem itself.

Do I want to create product X for the sake of product X, or do I want to solve the problem with market Y? A solution in search of a market is not much of a solution at all.

A nice side-effect of thinking deeply about the problem (and not the solution) is that you quickly identify all the substitutes and alternatives to solving that problem. In other words, is my solution for the problem a 10% increment over a substitute, or is it a 10x improvement?

My question to you (entrepreneur) is this: Did you fall in love with the technology you created or are you still in love with the problem-space?

Seattle 2.0 has a few events that we are planning for this year and to have a single point of contact for sponsorship on those events we got Scott Golembiewski to manage those relationships for us as our new Director of Sponsorships.

Beyond being a great person Scott is also a Seattle entrepreneur – like many of us at Seattle 2.0 -- founder of Tuneyfish, a social network for car enthusiasts and an iPhone app with some basic video for emergency situations, like How to Jump Start Your Car.

We'd like to thank our sponsors who support the Seattle 2.0 and, like us, are passionate about tech startups and want to make Seattle an even better place for them.

nPost

nPost.com is a site devoted to entrepreneurship and startups. The nPost.com Tech Startup Job Board features opportunities with Internet and Software startups. By focusing on the tech startup space, nPost brings together startups with people that are specifically interested in and familiar with the dynamic and high growth nature of startups.

Fenwick West LLP

Emerging technology companies partner with Fenwick & West for a broad range of services, through all stages of growth. We represent venture-backed private companies from formation and initial funding through IPOs and mergers. Through 30 years of partnering with leading technology start-up companies, we have obtained a deep understanding of how companies are formed, financed, grown and taken public or merged and earned the role of key trusted advisor. Fenwick is ranked by Dow Jones as the fourth most active U.S. law firm in helping IT clients raise venture capital and by MergerMarket and as one of the top five technology M&A practices in the U.S.

Eye Level Interaction Design

Eye Level is an interaction design studio performing at the intersection of design and technology. They create satisfying user experiences from the bones out, strengthening relationships between you and your customers. They’re experts at designing complex websites and interactive media from early concepts, through user testing, to graphic design, to launch.

Want to become a sponsor of Seattle 2.0? Learn more

Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person.

Today we recommend:

	Jordan Mitchell (@kickstand) kickstand.typepad.com Founder of OthersOnline.com (sold to the Rubicon Project). Entrepreneur. Father. Fly fisherman. Powder-hound. Mountain bike freerider.
	Marina Martin (@MarinaMartin) www.marinamartin.com Type-A business efficiency consultant. Unapologetic capitalist/Libertarian/Austrian. Navigationally inept. Curmudgeon. Guinness drinker. Jaywalker. Edge case.
	WTIA (@WTIA) www.washingtontechnology.org/ Washington Technology Industry Association is the largest statewide association of technology companies and executives in the world. With more than 1,000 member

Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.