My Little Piece of the MSNBC/Newsvine Thanksgiving Pie, and How You Can Get a Slice Too

Fig. 1.1: The MSNBC.com Music main page.

Fig. 1.2: A sample article footer.

Fig. 1.3: A graph of my traffic.

Fig. 1.4: A shameless plug.

This is a brief story about my little piece of the MSNBC/Newsvine pie. I normally don't like to write about myself – first, because let's face it: anyone who's paying attention already knows how great I am, and second, because it seems too... well, a little too Ani. I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide whether to write about this at all, but in the end I decided that it might benefit the community (or something), so here it is. See what you think.

What Happened

On Sunday afternoon, I published a short satirical rant criticizing Ani DiFranco (link above) for the new Listen In music group. It didn't take long to write, and I didn't think much of it. It went "popular" that day, with double-digit votes and comments. It was mostly received positively by members of the Newsvine community and in the silly, humorous spirit with which it was written. On Monday, it got a few more votes and comments – nothing too out of the ordinary. According to my Google Analytics stats it garnered about 180 pageviews – pretty good for a screwoff weekend piece of writing.

Then a strange thing happened. On Tuesday, a bunch of random new Viners started showing up, having signed up specifically to comment on my piece. Some of them sorta let me have it, but fair's fair. In fact, one of them suggested that I write a fascinating article about myself, so barry21: this one's for you. Thanks for being a good sport.

Anyway, I thought all this was a bit odd, so I asked where all these new people were coming from. They said, "MSNBC." I also thought this was odd, because the article had been published a few days ago and wasn't featured anywhere on the MSNBC community page, where the new Newsvine module is prominently featured.

So I did a bit more digging with the help of one Eric Atienza, and pointed in the right direction by some helpful MSNBC.com readers. Lo and behold, Eric turned up a link pointing directly to my article from MSNBC's "Other top music stories" section on the main Music page (see fig. 1.1) and at the bottom of every article in the Music section in a box reading "More from music" (see fig. 1.2). This, of course, was all very exciting, and I eagerly awaited new Google Analytics stats.

This morning, I woke up and checked my Analytics numbers over a cup of coffee. The pageview count for the article had jumped an order of magnitude: from about 180 hits to about 1,800. This was a huge spike in my numbers, obviously (see fig. 1.3) – I've never been a particularly prominent contributor, after all. And as of the publication of this article, the link is still featured on MSNBC.com.

Why it Happened

Obviously, this is part of MSNBC's continuing efforts to integrate Newsvine into its offerings. Why did they choose my silly little throwaway bit of satire? Here are my working hypotheses:

1. I am officially the best writer in the known universe. A letter is currently en-route to my house, offering fame and fortune in exchange for thoughtless, irresponsible hit pieces on popular musicians (this is the leading candidate in my mind).
2. They were seriously hurting for music-related content, and somebody dredged up my work and just went with it because they didn't want to stay late at the office.
3. It was selected by the mysterious workings of some algorithm, producing a result akin to Ohio State's spot atop the BCS rankings earlier this year despite playing the 70th-hardest schedule in the NCAA (gratuitous cheap shot – yea!).

Seriously, though, I have no idea why this happened. There were several actually-significant, well-written music pieces floating around at the time - not to mention the work of actual real-world significance that's produced here every day.

However, for the record I will give my backup kidney to any Newsvine staff member who is able to tell me why it was selected and how to reproduce the phenomenon.

Why This is Important to You, the 'Viner

This is probably already obvious, but let me state it for the record:

MSNBC.com is starting to pick up our work and integrate it into their site, and the result is potentially a huge boost in traffic for any piece so blessed by the powers that be and/or their shadowy algorithms. I wasn't able to turn up any other such links anywhere else on the site, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

We really are getting a lot more exposure from our new corporate overlords. Doubters, take note: this might just be working after all.

EDIT:

I'm not quite sure how I managed to leave this out, but here it is: The true point of all this is that we have an opportunity to really get our ideas out there, beyond the (sometimes insular) world of Newsvine.

So, use this as impetus to make every article you write, every link you seed, and every comment you make that much better. All of a sudden, we're on a much bigger stage. Think about that as you contribute, and let's all try to raise our game a little bit more.

Thanks to everyone who's here for making this place what it is - and what it isn't.

© Evan Mix 2007. Some rights reserved.

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