Nah Right’s Eskay: World’s Greatest Hip Hop Microblogger?

I checked out a somewhat interesting discussion recently in which Eskay's blogging practices at Nah Right briefly came under intense scrutiny.

At times it was like some kind of role playing game with the appearance of someone claiming to be an alchemist and someone else who is most definitely a troll!

I cut out when things got heated, around the time when the troll in "retired web pundit's" cloak arrived, but it reminded me of how confused and upset some bloggers get when confronted by the success of Nah Right, a success that none of his critics are likely to enjoy in the context of blogging.

While there are various criticisms one could make of Nah Right and the associated "community dialogue", it seems to me that folks are typically most bothered by Eskay's blogging practices because they don't fit certain definitions of blogging that confuse a content management system with a fetishized set of content creation practices.

Oddly enough, an early criticism nailed the nature of Nah Right on the head. The critique ran something along the lines of:
"I see you drop a link, then an album cover, then another link, then a video."

I find this odd because, now that everybody in hip hop is Twittering instead of Instant Messaging, they still don't seem to recognize that Eskay ushered in the age of hip hop microblogging.

While others waited for the technology to lead them there via services like Tumblr followed by the endgame of Twitter, which will become increasingly less of a microblogging system in order to survive, Eskay recognized early on the power of brief posts that feed a particular demographic.

To some degree, Eskay's style of blogging may have been born of the confluence of necessity and opportunity. During his early phase of blogging, he managed to situate himself at the nexus of hip hop tips and breaking news by featuring such items on his blog and by finding professional roles in New York hip hop media that also led to an overcrowded schedule of content creation.

Dropping quick hits to a hungry crowd is a fairly logical, if not inevitable, outcome and one which has met with great success due to the feedback loops of audience response and Google algorithms.

It works for a lot of reasons, many of which might be grounds for critique but, at the end of the day, Eskay is a very sucessful hip hop microblogger and he didn't have to wait for Twitter to recognize that the online equivalent of small talk at the neighborhood bar remains a powerful form of communication as entertainment.

Plus, given the archival nature of blogging software, he can monetize the content that Twitter users and neighborhood drunks let flow into the gutter like so many brand building streams of piss!

Now whether that makes him the Greatest Hip Hop Microblogger alive, given the emergence of the Notorious "I twitter when I'm not snacking" BIG, I'll leave for others to decide.