I believe Dave Winer has always advocated writing on your own space and linking into the conversation. I feel this is very insightful advice and pro-web and really "getting it".
I didn't get a chance yet to see what experiment Dave was building, his firehose, because scripting.com is down. But I'd give Dave the benefit of the doubt...
Try the NAPKIN style diagrams. I came across them in a technical article and found them eye-catching and fantastic. This is a neat and useful piece of software. The text format let's you crank out a meaningful diagram very quickly.
A good example of a novel minor marketing effort for your start-up. An excellent idea. Putting together something small like the Karma Widget is an enjoyable diversion to boot. We all need those once in a while.
wget URL > HTML
tidy HTML > XHTML
xslt [identity transform based content extraction] XHTML > XML
XML > DB
The whole process glued together with PERL or shell scripts. Depending on how you construct your content extraction, this technique can weather lots of the inevitable content style changes and easily adjusts when changes need to be made.