Time to give some credit where credit’s due.

First, I want to thank The Rap Up for being the biggest source of non-Google traffic to ProHipHop this year to date.  I like that blog.

I need to say a few words about Idolator, a blog on which I haven’t actually slept because I was consciously ignoring its existence until quite recently.

Here’s the deal.  When Gawker appeared and became a huge success I was appalled because I did not yet understand that gossip blogs are the true pinnacle of web publishing.  So when Idolator followed I just busied myself with the overwhelming range of online news sources and their existence gradually disappeared from my consciousness.

But now I accept the supreme dominance of gossip blogs so, when Idolator finally started linking to me, I started paying attention.  Though it didn’t result in a huge wave of traffic like I would have assumed from any blog in Mr. Denton’s empire, it did make me feel all warm and fuzzy, especially since they didn’t seem to be making fun of me.

The damn thing is, though they generally disguise their serious intent, Idolator bloggers do an excellent job of focusing on key bits of industry news.  Even if you hate rock music and snarky attitudes, you can keep up with a lot of interesting stuff by just clicking through the links, though I have to admit to actually reading their posts all the way through.

There are many more blogs I follow and I can’t thank them all at the moment.  But if you’re interested in which blogs I follow and where I get my news, more and more it’s from the mixed feeds with which I’ve been experimenting.

Almost all of my hip hop news now comes from the blogs and news sources gathered at World Cypher.  The blogs include some by folks who’ve dissed me in the past but I’m trying not to hold that against talented bloggers led astray by evil influences.

I keep up with music industry blogs at Music Biz Blogs and I follow Web and Media 2.0 developments via the various mixed feeds at Flux Research.  I really started these as tools for my own work and interests, because I’m finding newsreaders just don’t work well for me, but it just seemed oh so Web 2.0-ish to share those tools.  At best World Cypher has vague commercial potential but it’s not really going down like that.

So let me close by thanking the many bloggers whose work I leverage at both ProHipHop and VidRap.  Without you, this "job" would really suck.

Thanks everybody!

Hey, if your rss feed plays well with others and you really think you should be included in one of these feeds, drop me a friendly note and I’ll check things out:
clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com

As per usual, all other pr should go to:
hiphoppress(at)netweed(dot)com