GeekDad Poll Results and a Call to Our Readers

We ran a poll yesterday on GeekDad, and while not everyone may have gotten to put their say in it yet, there’s been a large enough response to make some conclusions. The big one I walk away with is that, while we can pick out a favorite (Geeky How-tos) and a least favorite (Music Reviews – Sorry Z!), it’s really a very gentle curve rolling across all those types of posts we do. No one type failed to get double-digit votes, which says to me that we’re doing pretty well across the board as to the content we’re bringing you.

It was nice to see, for example, that we haven’t bored you all to death yet with our "Top 10" lists. And that’s an important thing I’ll come back to. We can also see that How-tos, Projects, Toy Reviews, Pointer Posts are all welcome, and types of posts we can try to focus on even more.

Now comes our request to all of you, our regular readers. As you can probably tell every now and then, we are not professional writers/bloggers – at least, this isn’t our career. While GeekDad functions under the Wired banner, that’s because it was Chris Anderson‘s idea and he was able to get the blog set up there. At its heart, GeekDad has always been a collection of real geeky dads, usually writing for not much more than a pittance, an occasional free review copy of some game or book, a bonus if they get lucky enough to have a post go popular on Digg or Yahoo Buzz, and the cool factor of sharing our geeky parenting experiences with a like-minded audience. None of us do this as a job – it’s a hobby, something we do with the white space between our families and careers. But being part of Wired, we do have goals, and we have to earn our keep, which means bringing in pageviews that help them buy ads.

How can you all help? It’s easy, actually. First, read us. Read every story that comes through. Indeed, there’s probably a good chance you’re already doing that. Second (and more important), help us on the social news sites. At the bottom of every GeekDad post, there are links to the various social news sites. Reddit, Digg, and Yahoo Buzz are three of the biggest, and can bring the biggest rewards. If you have memberships for any or all of these and you see that someone had already submitted a story there, then please vote us up, and share us with friends if possible. If we haven’t been submitted, and you have a good friends network, go ahead and submit the story and get us going. In the world of blogging, pageviews (and unique visitors) are king, and any time one of our posts goes popular on one of these sites, it is a huge boost in the arm to us (indeed, making it big on Yahoo Buzz can double our monthly totals). We certainly had a great deal of luck recently with some of our Top-10 lists on Digg, which has brought us many new readers, and boosted our standing on Technorati, and led to some of these cool lists we’ve gotten on lately. But the challenge is keeping it all going.

So, that’s it. We are all very grateful for all of you reading what we do here. We’re geeks, just like you, and are having a great time sharing our experiences. And if you can help us out with the pageviews, and by getting all your friend and family reading us too? Well, that’s just double-plus good! Thanks!