Nah Righting the Ship

Just a few follow-up thoughts on Tuesday’s post and how it was received. Thanks for the feedback on it and for spreading it. It was a thrill to see that kind of reception to the piece.

The day I saw Miss Info and Bol pass Nah Right in referral numbers on that YouTube video I knew I was going to do a post on the topic. That was over six weeks ago. I wasn’t sure how to frame the discussion and didn’t figure that out until I forced myself to just sit down and start typing.

Lesson for me
Just write! Dave Winer posting on the demise of his hyperlocal news site helped remind me that blogging scales when it is participatory and open. There’s not much sense hoarding ideas and obsessing about perfection. That doesn’t make for conversation. I’ve been impressed by peers who stay on the grind blogging every week but I’m especially inspired at the moment by the style of bloggers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Mastick who develop sophisticated ideas over time through short daily blogging. It’s a kind of thinking aloud, circling back to past posts, incorporating user comments, working towards understanding and building up to lengthier dispatches when appropriate. I plan to start doing more of that style here, embracing iteration in the blogging process to a greater extent than I have.

Eskay Interviews at Unkut
It was a lucky coincidence that I posted my piece the same day Robbie went live with his eskay interview. Part 2 focuses more on Nah Right, so it’s more relevant to our discuission. In that one eskay talks about how he got heavy into aggregation while he was editing for XXL and lacked the time to keep up with his past approach at content. Also how he came to favor letting people make their own decision about the mp3’s he was posting instead of offering any commentary.

I never said Nah Right was wrong
Hashim said in the first comment that I have a rare insight into these topics because of the time I’ve spent in hip-hop blogging and the relationships I have with the players. I think he forgot the most important factor to my perspective, which is that I’m not really just looking at this as a blogger but also as someone in the artist role trying to get my projects visible in different outlets. So it was funny to me when many bloggers took my message to be that Nah Right is doing something WRONG and perhaps conversely that they are doing something right.

Just because Nah Right lost me as a reader doesn’t mean they fucked up. Hardly that. They are clearly successful, clearly have a loyal audience and in fact just this February I was quite harsh in chiding Hashim and others in the Hip-Hop ads group who claimed that Nah Right’s success was just about posting a million times a day and that a better version of the site could be built by adding more of a voice. To me it seemed a flawed critique because NR rose to the top by being a great filter and then leveraged their large loyal audience with a less selective approach. It’s smart business but it only works for the few at the top of the marketplace and looking at all the struggling aggregators is proof of that.

The bigger question when considering that loyal audience is what is that tribe about? The tribe at Nah Right like the user-base of a forum is primarily about going to Nah Right. And yes I am suggesting that eskay’s tribe, the desperate music industry and even the people clicking “read all” from the safety of their google reader may all be fooling themself when it comes to the importance (or let us use that nebulous word “influence”) of the venue. No doubt, Nah Right is the leader of the blog pack and so it’s somewhat of a grand stage when you look at the traffic numbers. Television gets big numbers too but it also encourages a very passive level of involvement and might not really be the best way to get a message across.

Alternative to what?
One thing I probably should have mentioned in the first post is there are two problems with going after attention on the smaller blogs. The first is that many of these blogs it feels like are literally talking to nobody. Just because they made their own lane with content you don’t find everywhere else or speak with an authentic voice doesn’t mean anybody cares. So try to figure that part out first. Who is this blog talking to? And is anybody talking back? That’s a good question for bloggers to ask about their own blogs as well. A few of you in the comments mentioned difficulties building an audience. It’s really a bigger topic but I’ll try to address it in the future.

The other big thing to be aware of is the big win of a trusted, passionate, discerning fan only comes if that person genuinely loves your work. You have to be awesome first, before these people will give you that.

So, the qualities that drive aggregator blogs and help publicists get their stuff posted there are the same things that diminish the value of the posts. And the qualities that make real, visible fans so valuable are the same things that will make it hard for you to pitch to them.

State of the Share-o-sphere

The way Tuesday’s post spread also confirms how much things have changed since 2007. Although the post received a lot of traffic and comments, it seems the referrals mostly came from Twitter or Google Shared Items. As far as I can tell only four blogs actually linked to the piece and none with anything significant to say. This is very different from 2006 or 2007 where when a blog post got noticed as crowd-worthy it tended to get linked and commented on at 10-20 blogs. The attention has definitely shifted to different arenas. Hell, I didn’t even get a Nah Right Lite spot. What kind of aggregator is that?