When I started Media Orchard back in March 2005, I had no idea what I was doing — or what I was getting myself into. I tried the conventional route of talking about how PR people should pitch to bloggers, whether a given PR campaign was sufficiently “transparent” to appease the blogosphere, blog this, podcast that, wiki wiki wiki, blah blah blah. I got really bored.
When I started blogging about the PR and marketing implications of things I actually enjoyed — pop culture, politics, TV and movies, viral videos, women in bikinis, etc. — I started having fun and kind of got addicted to it. And that’s when people started reading my blog as well. So it worked out pretty well.
Lately though, I’ve been so busy with client work that it’s been difficult to keep up with Media Orchard as well as I’d like. In particular, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to spend as much time digging up the kind of media, marketing and PR nuggets that I enjoy reading so much on the Web.
So I’ve created a new, easier way to keep up with the news — for me, and hopefully, for you, too. It’s called Spin Thicket.
Spin Thicket, as should be apparent, is patterned after one of my favorite Web sites, Fark.com, along with similar sites like Fazed.net and others. The difference is that it’s specifically geared to people with an interest in the image-making professions — advertising, PR, marketing, journalism, and politics.
Spin Thicket has no agenda. It’s as much for people who read PR Watch as PR Week. It’s as much for fans (or haters) of Michelle Malkin as Kos. It’s as much for people who see bias in the NY Times as Fox News. Throw it all in the wash and turn on the spin cycle; that’s the idea behind Spin Thicket.
Of course, I can’t do it alone — at least not indefinitely. So I encourage you to add links. It’s as simple as can be; just register, bookmark this page and submit at will.
In fact, I encourage you specifically to add links to your own blog posts and those of your friends — as long it’s not boring stuff about RSS. Did you know that of the thousands of links submitted to Fark each day, as many as half are submitted by the person or media organization who wrote the post, according to Fark’s founder, Drew Curtis? So there’s no shame in it; don’t be modest.
Of course, a link from Spin Thicket won’t get you 20,000 referrals like a link from Fark — at least initially. But in time, who knows?
It’s all about whether there are enough people interested in the same kind of stuff that I am, and that, I assume, you are. With your help, maybe we can create something cool.
If you like the idea and want to get involved, here are two things you can do right away to help:
1. Submit a logo or button for your blog, so we can add it as an official news source on Spin Thicket.
2. Submit a link — or 50 — on Spin Thicket.
Go ahead; do it!