I thought some of the points in last weeks Ten Steps To Ten Thousand Sign Ups Before We Even Launch Our Startup were much more thought out and useful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571228
The reason I wrote the article is because I'd like to share my experience with other entrepreneurs and initiate a dialog to discuss best practices. Of course I DO hope people will check out our service as well, but that's not my main objective here. If it was, I wouldn't spend my time writing a blog post.
2) Even if your main objective is for people to check out your services (which is a good main objective for a business to have...), isn't writing informative, useful blog posts that people will reference and pass around a good way to help accomplish that objective? The two aren't mutually exclusive.