open letter to hype machine (via creamteam)

I 100% agree with the points made below by Veronica @CreamTeam.
It was a disappointment to read of the latest updates announced last week by Hype Machine.

"An important change on the front page is the selection of blogs we draw from.  By default, we now show posts from the top 100 music blogs as reported by Technorati, Delicious and our data.  You can click “all blogs” to see the latest posts from all blogs we index."
Addmittedly they do say they are experimenting but I think many of us have seen Hype Machine moving in this direction.

Veronica's Response:
Your site has changed the way music is communicated in the digital sphere. You have forged a community from bloggers of disparate tastes, ages and nationalities. Behind the curtain of your green tinted pages and embedded players we have become more than a link on your homepage, we have become a network of friends. We’ve taken on projects together, attended shows from artists we discovered on your site and talked, laughed and slept on each others’ couches all in the name of our common passion, music.

Your recent decision to feature only content from the Top 100 Blogs on the site’s homepage is a slap in the face to the very music community you connected. A ranking determined by del.icio.us and technorati scores is hardly a fair system of measurement. You have taken “people excited about music, thinking, drawing, experimenting, creating” and ranked the worth of their voice in web stats.

A selection model based on hard data is an ineffective direction for community building. What was once camaraderie will turn to competition as we see an increase in sites building large blog rolls to gain popularity versus choosing an edited selection of like-minded writers for link exchanges. Indexed blogs not featured in the Top 100 will be swayed to post artists based on popularity to increase the chances of having their content seen via site search. When popularity replaces originality not only is journalistic morality tested, but up and coming talent is pushed off the grid.

It’s said that a picture is worth more than words and in a medium where we are so often anonymous, it feels like an appropriate occasion to meet face to face.

Comments

[mjrc]

you know that the uproar of users and bloggers alike got them to change their minds, right? instead of the "top 100" blogs being the default view, they're going with "overview," which means one post per 24-hour-period per blog will appear there. there's still the "view all" option, which lists everything that everyone's posted, but it's not the default view.

personally, i am very much relieved that they didn't stick with the "top 100" plan, as clearly it was a horrible idea on lots of levels.

anyway, it's a pretty good compromise. : )

[cubikmusik]

thanks both for your comments.

signature x: good points and all very intriguing.

justin: very true, there has always been a whiff of that alright. i just wish they'd add the ability to search for blogs but for some reason its not really possible.
i've kinda stopped using both hypem and elbo.ws at this stage.
going old school by following links! ;)

[signaturex]

not only is journalistic morality tested, but up and coming talent is pushed off the grid."" isn't that the point of the better business model.. reinforce cooperating and paying tributaries and crush the rogues. You can't make money from a mutant butterfly.

X_____________

[Justin Mason]

so what's new here? They always cherrypicked which blogs they scraped, only now they're even more elitist about it. Just use elbo.ws instead...