Fleshbot's Dirty Secret Recipe

Wired News ran a story today called "Sex and Tech in the Fleshbot", by Kari L. Dean. The article talks about the initial reaction to Nick Denton's new microcontent blog Fleshbot. The article also makes reference to the leaked internal memo Denton sent me a few weeks back.

"However, Denton hasn't been shy about stoking the hype for Fleshbot. He reportedly leaked an "internal memo" about the site to popular blogger Steve MacLaughlin right before the site launched. The memo lends some insight into the tech and pop intentions of the site." - Kari L. Dean, "Sex and Tech in the Fleshbot"

The reporter notes how Denton declined media interviews about the site, and a source for the story viewed the "leak of the memo as a brilliant media ploy." That remark made me chuckle a bit, so I thought I would explain just exactly how I got the memo from Nick Denton in the first place. Here's the real story:

Suffice to say, there was a lot of low level noise in the blogosphere that Denton was about to take his microcontent model in an entirely new direction. You couldn't find anything anywhere about exactly what the Gawker founder was up to, so I decided to just go straight to the horse's mouth. Nick and I traded some emails, I expressed to him that I wasn't interested in just rehashing what everyone else was reporting, and he sent me a copy of a very detailed internal memo. Nick's only request was that I not publish the entire memo, but that anything else was fair game. I choose selections from the memo that were more revealing, but still left something to the imagination.

If there was a "brilliant media ploy" on Denton's part it was knowing that information coming from inside the blogosphere is more legitimate than information from the outside. Had Wired News been the outlet that published the exact same excerpts from the memo, then it may have been viewed as typical empty PR buzz. Instead, Fleshbot's dirty secret recipe for promotion was to use a "popular blogger" to report on something happening in bloggerville. The secret of course is that there is really no secret at all. It just makes sense and that's why Nick Denton has been so successful.