More Ke$ha convo, plus a question

[koganbot]

Over on my lj I've provided six more links to good Ke$ha commentary, including this epic tumblr post by Jonathan Bogart. Plus, in my comment thread, jauntyalan asks:

wow - why isn't there stuff like that big post on poptimists? what happened in my year off it? :-(

A quick but very incomplete answer might be: a lot of the action moved to tumblr, which allows easy reposting and excerpting of other people's posts plus a way of tracking every single repost/excerpt of an original post and its derivatives and any comment on those posts that anyone makes anywhere on tumblr, so you can follow the convo all through a bunch of different users, some of whom may previously have been unknown to one another. Also, apparently the r&b discussion over on ILM has vastly improved, and Lex has jumped there, leaving poptimists without the participant who is most engaged with contemporary music. And the Singles Jukebox has become another crucial node of good conversation, since it's now the best review site I've ever seen on the Web (of course I generally am bored silly by review sites, so never look at them, so that's not an informed opinion, though I'll bet it's right). The Jukebox has comment threads, which often contain writing that's as smart as the reviews.

Also, fewer songs hit the British charts these days, and they're generally not as good as the songs that were charting a few years ago, so this has put a damper on Another Decade In Pop. But none of this really explains why there's less substantive commentary on the music here than in days past, and fewer substantive responses to the substantive commentary (not that getting substantive response wasn't always a problem).

Comments

My strategy

[koganbot]

I actually have a tumblr and a twitter but so far I only use them as feeds for my lj. My own strategy has been to try to link my lj into various conversations (and link the convos into my lj). The reason I stick with my lj is that the "culture" of my lj is to encourage long responses, and I also like the fact that if need be I can lead the discussion. (Not that there isn't value in leaderless discussions, too.) And the reason that, e.g., my long Ke$ha posts are on my lj (or reposted there from the Jukebox) rather than here on poptimists is that I'm trying to weave my lj into the broader conversation, while being less concerned with weaving the poptimists convo in. It might be worthwhile if someone tried to do the latter, of course.

[koganbot]

By the way, does anyone know what tumblr's business model is?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i sort of figured there was some tumblr migration, and have revived mine

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember something about them offering stuff people could pay for, LJ-style. (Among that stuff: an appearance in the "recommended" section of the Dashboard, which I feel like will not work the way they think it will work.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

What's the address?

The one problem I have with Tumblr (and Twitter and a lot of newer platforms) is that it's harder than ever to keep track of where the hell everyone is. I notice that even I have a very obscure link to the Cure for Bedbugs Tumblr on the main site; it's likely that some casual readers of it wouldn't know that my tumblr even exists. I should change that!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

The trade-off is that once you make contact following the conversation is much easier. But that doesn't help me if I can't find the thread of convo in the first place (I doubt I'm missing that much, since friends of friends always tend to show up and I'll pay attention sooner or later -- as was the case for Jonathan Bogart and whoever andrewtsks is and a few other poeple).