The blog is our #1 recruitment tool, accounts for a significant amount of our inbound services sales activity, 100% of our product inbounds (we're saturated now), and probably more than 50% of our press activity.

Everyone in the company writes. We run the site loosely like a "real" publication, with an editorial calendar. We have a few semi-effective management tricks for keeping posts on schedule.

In the future, the blog is going to account for 100% of our open source software releases (I'm releasing something significant on it next week), and an increasing amount of our research work --- we're going to publish more things on the blog, rather than waiting for events like Black Hat.

The big difference between our blog and corporate blogs is that we write about our space, the technology we work with, and the news in our industry, but almost never about the company itself.

We generally have the rule that as authors we write the blog for ourselves first - then we either keep it internal or publish it externally.

It's actually a great documentation tool and really helps record and solidify thinking that you might never get down on paper - particularly when we're dealing with topics that would not usually be documented via the usual processes (e.g. non-technical).

Those are great rules.

Was Matasano arranged like this from the outset, or did you grow into it?

No. We fell completely ass backwards into it. I had a little blog in 2004; towards the middle of 2005, we felt like we had crappy marketing, sales, and outreach. We wrote a marketing plan with 3 major prongs --- Google ads, having everyone start writing for the blog, and I forget the third thing. The only thing that worked was the blog.

I owe my cofounder relationship to my blog, and the idea for my company only came to me after writing about what sort of thing I wanted to work on.

That said, it's not exactly a blog for the company. Our intentions are, though, that as we build this thing (a compressed air powered scooter) we'll post more and more that's of interest. We'll have a little photoblog, which I think will give investors and readers and prospective engineers a window into the operations of the company, and might build up some buzz. It's also a soapbox, which I tend to enjoy. :-)

I put a ton of time into my blog though. About 1 - 2 days in the writing/editing phase, and a pipeline for research and thinking and trying out the ideas in conversation is weeks or months long.

At our small local radio station (I know it's not YC, but I hope this is vaguely relevant), the blog is pretty awful. It's simply an endless stream of calls-to-action along the lines of "come to event X on Saturday", or "listen to our new drive time host", or even "visit our sponsor, XYZ Ford on High Street". It's quite possibly the bossiest blog I've ever come across, and being the muppet who's ended up in charge of web stuff I write most of it! We don't even have commenting turned on by order of management, "in case someone was to post something offensive". In common with most things related to the radio industry's fumbling forays into the online world, it's like something from 1996. Accordingly, visitor numbers are through the floor.

Given a free rein to write what I wanted, I'd change the tone of the thing completely. First, I'd start writing posts that really put across the atmosphere of an exciting radio station full of creative people. I'd make posts about funny or interesting things that had happened that day, guests we'd had in the studio, events we'd reported from. I'd point readers to things on the web that we'd liked and give them an insight into what it's like behind the scenes.

Perhaps--shock horror--we might even write occasionally about things that aren't work-related and are of interest to people outside our immediate audience, in the same way as Pingdom, that uptime-monitoring firm that gets on the social news sites every five minutes. Then I'd flip the commenting switch and turn what is currently a fairly dull company mouthpiece into a conversation, where listeners could tell us what they thought and communicate with us and between themselves.

I might just do it and see what happens.

On a related note, the blog at http://onegoldensquare.com/ makes for an interesting read. It's from a British national radio station called Virgin Radio, which is changing its name and programming. Rather than smothering itself with the thick veil of confidentiality that usually surrounds the radio industry when it does things like this, they've set up the blog with posts by staff from the programme controller down about what they're doing and why they're doing it, along with writing on all sorts of diverse subjects. It's a refreshing change and well worth a quick look at as an example of a quality company blog.

My startup is building our company around the blog: We have started to blog each day about different things that career-minded college students might find interesting. The writing has a Gawker-like flavor to it and the plan is to build up some sort of loyal reader base so that when we release our app, we will automatically have users.

Shameless self promotion here: http://findthepulse.com/blog

The genesis of my startup, HubSpot, was the positive impact that blogging could have on a small business.

Today, blogging is a critical component of our inbound marketing efforts. That's how many of our potential customers hear about us, and it's what we use to establish thought leadership in our industry

If you're working on a startup, my advice would be to skip the business plan and go write a blog.

If they can do everything you can do why are they talking to you?