Improve blog post frequency

[AdiReske]

Hi,

Our last Dask blog is from Feb 2022 https://blog.dask.org/

Content like blogs, videos and events are really important to improve our 'google score' aka SEO and increase the size of our community. How can we improve on that?

1. Do folks know what is the process to contribute a blog to the Dask site?
2. Do folks have time or patience to write?
3. any other reason?

Possible solutions:
a. I'm still new to this community and I may have missed that but maybe we need to reiterate the process of contributing a blog
b. We can possibly get a 'Dask community writer' who can help with writing/editing needs? I have a few resources I can offer.
c. any other ideas?

[jacobtomlinson]

We should definitely get more content on the blog. I think there are a few factors for the recent slowdown:

• Folks are busy, writing posts for a community blog is generally low priority for most people.
• Historically @mrocklin wrote a lot of that content or coaxed others into doing so, but is rather busy with CEO stuff these days.
• @GenevieveBuckley wrote a bunch of awesome content more recently but she has since moved on.
• People in the general community may not know we want posts.

A few thoughts on improving things:

• Perhaps one or two folks should "own" the community blog and actively solicit content from the community. I would be happy to take this on as a continuation of the Website refresh work we've been doing. But it would be great to have someone else involved.
• We should announce more broadly to the community that we would love to have their content on the blog. Improving our guidelines on contributing would definitely help here. We could also plug this at our monthly community meeting.
• When large/exciting changes happen in Dask we should encourage the contributors to write something up. If folks are regularly contributing to Dask it would be great for them to occasionally write posts. Many people contribute to Dask full-time these days, so we have a nice pool to dip into.

[mrocklin]

Thank you for bringing this up @jacobtomlinson . Big 👍 from me. Anyone who wants to take on the role of Blog Steward would have, I think, a lot of impact and a lot of respect and appreciation from me (and others I suspect).

One activity I'd suggest is looking at Twitter for "dask" and soliciting blogs or videos from folks mentioning it there. There's often a few relevant tweets every week that would probably make for good posts. If you got 1/10 to write a blog post that would be pretty good flow I think.

[AdiReske]

@jacobtomlinson love the idea of plugging in the monthly meeting. Where else should we talk about that?

Also, I have a couple of excellent writer that I'm more than happy to 'lend' to people for free to help them draft blogs. What's the best way to communicate that?

[jacobtomlinson]

Ok great, in that case I'm going to volunteer to be the blog steward and block out some regular time to scrub through twitter, ping interesting folks and generally drive the blog forwards. If anyone else wants to help out I'd be very grateful.

@AdiReske I'll put together some clear instructions and then we can amplify that via Twitter, etc.

Having a writer around sounds useful. I'm not really sure we really want to be going down the road of ghostwritten content, the Dask blog should always feel very community-driven, but co-written content could be great. Also having someone available for proofreading and editing would be very valuable.

[LilyMelnyk]

@jacobtomlinson I'm happy to help on the SEO front as well if we want to take a data-driven approach to the types of topics/keywords we think will harness the most interest/search volume :) Happy create lists of high value keywords we may want to target, give guidance on topics, or do SEO reviews of content about to go live to tweak for maximum SEO-ness!

[jacobtomlinson]

@LilyMelnyk thanks for the offer, your expertise is much appreciated here. I worry a little about manufacturing content on the Dask blog to hit specific keywords, it would probably make it feel more like a corporate blog rather than a community one. However, I think tuning organic content from the community to rank higher would be very valuable.

Your suggestion of creating some lists of high-value keywords would be a good exercise and valuable information to post authors, but I would rather try to enhance/align post suggestions from the community rather than create content purely to hit a keyword.

If there are keywords and topics we want to target I think we should be doing that with documentation pages rather than blog posts. The Spark vs Dask documentation page is a good example of this.

[GenevieveBuckley]

@jacobtomlinson here is an item that would make a good blogpost

• https://twitter.com/science_is_hard/status/1543641327555919872
• https://elifesciences.org/articles/70661

And if you like that kind of content, Loic Royer's lab has some earlier work that involves Dask too. Let me know if you want to discuss.

Agree with Matt's suggestion that twitter is a good place to find new content. The hard part is getting other people to stop waiting until their idea/project/draft is perfect enough to want to submit it. If you don't mind having the same person always as the blogpost author, then "hey, look at this cool thing so-and-so did" + pointing to publicly available stuff would work well as a format.