GeekDad blog thrives because of awareness of audience

What do Legos, standardized testing, online museums and robots have in common?

Well, for one, there’s the GeekDad blog on Wired.com. Originally the brainchild of Wired.com Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson in March 2007, GeekDad has since become one of the most popular blogs on the site. (See our recent post on Wired.com for more of the history of the GeekDad blog)

By day, the current editor of GeekDad (since September 2007), Ken Denmead, is a civil engineer. He described himself as “very much a geek and very much a father.” By combining these interests to create the tone of the blog, Denmead said, “I’ve tried to turn it into the Wired.com parenting blog.”

Denmeads sons, 11-year-old Eli and nine-year-old Quinn, have enjoyed some of the perks of their dad’s online moonlighting gig, and Denmead has learned some things from his kids. He often receives free, sample video games from companies who want their products reviewed on the blog.

“I won’t necessarily play them completely myself,” Denmead said. “I’ll throw ‘em to the kids and say, ‘Hey, play this, and then let me sit with you while you play it, and you tell me how you feel about it while you’re playing.’”

As a result, both the parent’s and the kids’ perspectives are reflected in the blog post — and Denmead gets to spend some quality game-playing time with his sons. Eli and Quinn aren’t complaining.

“A new game for the Wii or the DS shows up every couple of weeks, so they’re happy about that,” he said.

GeekDad contributor Matt Blum, a software engineer, also finds inspiration for posts from his kids. Blum has a six-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. One day, when the whole family was in the car, Blum’s daughter asked where the first human beings came from.

“My wife and I are both staunch believers in evolution,” Blum said, and so his daughter’s question led to a discussion of evolution. “I wrote a post about that because it’s a tough question. We weren’t prepared for her to ask that sort of question.”

The comments from GeekDad readers, some with similar beliefs and some with different ones, continued the discussion online. Denmead said that the interaction with readers has contributed to the popularity of the blog — which averages 20,000 to 22,000 hits per day. He uses Google analytics to gauge the traffic.

“One of the weird things about GeekDad within the larger Wired universe is that we really do speak more directly to our readers as sort of a personal conversation, whereas most of the rest of Wired is much more about posting news articles,” he said.

In order to increase posts’ visibility on the Wired.com main page, Denmead encourages the bloggers to vary the tone of the posts between conversational and more formal news reporting because the latter have a better chance of being featured on the main website. This kind of publicity draws readers to the blog.

“It’s been a lesson in journalism and in good writing for publication,” Denmead said.

Still, the driving force of GeekDad is its awareness of its audience. Blum has utilized his readers’ knowledge when preparing questions for interviews. He has asked readers to respond via Twitter with questions they’d like to ask a particular interview subject, such as Adam Savage of the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters.

“He does tons of interviews, so I didn’t want to ask him the same questions that everybody had already asked him, because what’s the point” Blum said about interviewing Savage.

To avoid duplicating previously published information, Blum does his own research prior to interviews and said that the readers’ contributions are also helpful.

“I figure if I’m asking the readers,” he said, “not only are they helping me, but that way the end product will be that much more interesting to the readers because they’ve had some input into it.”

He said Twitter offers the perfect means of gathering information for this purpose.

For Denmead, his work as the GeekDad editor has blossomed into a book deal. He was approached by a literary agent and, after researching the agency to make sure it was legit, wrote a book proposal that got picked up by Penguin Viking. The book, which will probably be titled “The GeekDad Book,” is a collection of “geeky” projects that parents can do with their kids.

The test group for these projects? Denmead’s sons Eli and Quinn, of course. The book is scheduled to come out around Father’s Day in 2010.

This kind of family-oriented material is largely what makes the GeekDad blog so easy for its readers to relate to.

“It is very much the nature of GeekDad to try and be a community blog,” Denmead said.

All of the bloggers are unpaid and write from different parts of the country (and the world—one author lives in Australia), which provides the blog with varied and fresh perspectives. The bloggers clearly share one thing in common with each other and with their readers.

“We are literally what the title is,” he said. “We are geek dads — and a couple of geek moms.”

Wired.com harnesses readers to produce better content

Wired.com has some of the most techno-savvy readers of any publication, and editor in chief Evan Hansen is not afraid to use them.

As it turns out, the online publication has fostered symbiotic relationships with its blog readers in a variety of different ways, all of which have been beneficial both to Wired.com and to its sharp-minded readers.

“You have the ability to reveal the story in progress, this sort of ‘process-is-content’ notion,” Hansen explained about blogging. “You reveal what you have, as it comes in, and then you invite the readers and the public to help you finish the story.”

This method of reporting has improved blogging at Wired.com, particularly when Hansen and his colleagues have taken experimental risks that have become incredibly successful. Most prominent among these experiments is the Geekdad blog, which features posts from self-proclaimed “geek” dads and moms. The contributors submit one or two posts a week, typically about science or technology topics that appeal to parents and kids alike.

Nintendo, NASA, and Legos are all fair game. Originally, the blog was run solely by Chris Anderson, but it became too much for one person to handle, so Anderson reached out to readers and asked whether any of them wanted to contribute.

“He found some people who were very qualified to do it, and he took that chance,” Hansen said, “and it worked out.”

“Worked out” is putting it mildly. Geekdad is now one of the most popular blogs on the site, and its contributors write posts for free — yes, free! — from all over the country. The blog’s unpaid editor, Ken Denmead, now has a book deal in the works as a direct result of the blog.

As of April 15, 2009, Denmead has sent out a call for more contributors. If the past is any indication, he’s going to get responses from plenty of enthusiastic, knowledgeable participants — just the sort of people who fuel the content of Geekdad.

As an editor who entrusts readers with blog content, Hansen laughed and said, “You’ve got to close your eyes a little bit and kind of just have faith that stuff that comes out is going to be in line with your brand and your sense of quality. It was a leap of faith, but it really turned out well. It’s an interesting and eclectic and, I think, very high quality publication now.”

Hansen estimates that 20-25 percent of what gets blogged about at Wired.com either starts with or includes tips from readers. The site uses a feedback tool developed by Reddit specifically for Wired.com blogs that allows users to upload text and pictures and also assists with sorting the content offered by readers. When Cal Tech grad student Virgil Griffith introduced the Wikiscanner in 2007, the Threat Level blog at Wired.com asked readers to submit IP addresses of Wikipedia users who were editing the online encyclopedia to suit their own agenda.

Using the Reddit tool to upload their findings to Threat Level, readers exposed hundreds of instances of corporate whitewashing on Wikipedia and then voted to determine the most appalling ones. In 2008, the project earned Wired.com a Knight-Batten award for innovation in journalism; Wired.com gave the $10,000 award to Wikiscanner creator Virgil Griffith.

The kind of reader/blog interaction that changes journalism is, of course, only available on the Internet. Hansen emphasized that Wired.com has the advantage of being a stand-alone Web site with original content, as opposed to being an offshoot of a print publication. Although Conde Nast now owns both Wired magazine and Wired.com, the two publications remain separate in terms of staff and news stories.

“The marriage back with the magazine has been very beneficial financially and otherwise,” Hansen said. “But, again, the structure here is that the Web site is considered to be its own business. We are very collaborative, and we share a brand, and we’re very respectful of the magazine…but we’re not the red-headed stepchild of a print publication.”

While the magazine and the Web site have different modes of operation, Hansen observed that the fundamentals of journalism apply to both.

“The most surprising thing is that the more we got into blogging, the more we realized it’s not all that different from ordinary news gathering,” he said. “The same rules apply in terms of accuracy, confirming information.”

For the blogs, Hansen said the goal is not to be an aggregation site but rather to do original reporting.

“Which means that you’ve got to pick up the phone,” he said. “You’ve got to talk to people. You’ve got to chase down facts and not just link to other people.”

And, it seems, it also helps if you’re something of a risk-taker — with very smart readers.