After over a year of experiments with YouTube video blogs, mixed newsfeeds, microsites and guest blogging I’m now focusing my endeavors on ProHipHop and the related sites that have built the strongest audiences.

You can check the navigation bar at the top of the page to see where my energies are now being focused.  It feels good to have some clarity, however temporary, about the limits of my current online activities.

Here’s what’s changed:

I’m no longer blogging at Fast Company but I do expect to return to related topics in a new project I hope to launch after I’m done settling in and start getting antsy, probably at Flux Research.

[think: business, information services, media 2.0, open access publishing and the distributed library, yadadadamean?]

Though I’m not relaunching Weekly Hip Hop Albums I have returned to updating netweed’s Hip Hop Albums section at a lighter volume.  I’m also adding graphics to both Hip Hop Albums and Hip Hop Movies and will be doing more with both those resources in the near future.

Hip Hop Logic is back in action on a light posting schedule with a continued focus on hip hop culture and politics.  Hip Hop Logic is where I started blogging almost five years ago and it’s nice to see the old spot back in action.

VidRap and World Cypher have been the best received of such experiments and will continue to be a core part of ProHipHop’s related endeavors going forward.

Hip Hop Press is currently my most successful site in terms of raw traffic with 59k unique visitors and 89k pageviews over the last month.  For analytics geeks, my reading is that the high number of unique viewers coming mainly from search engines, the high clickthrough rates on ads and the average time of over 4 minutes spent on the site per visit suggests a combination of lots of casual web surfers and a core of deeply engaged readers.

On the larger issue of ProHipHop’s future, which was raised as a topic of discussion last summer, I have not secured an academic position for the fall and am planning on business as usual at ProHipHop for another year.  That could change given a variety of last minute possibilities but I started this season’s search very late in the game and the vast majority of relevant upcoming positions will be for Fall 2008 so my overall planning is based on that timeframe.

Given that I had been preparing to become a minor contributor at ProHipHop in order to take on fulltime responsibilities elsewhere, I’m finding myself really excited about having what looks like another year with ProHipHop as a primary focus.

So it’s time to pick up the pace as summer begins to fade and fall comes into view.