Okay, let me try that again

So, looking at the post below, which I slammed out in a matter of seconds as the last thing before shutting off the computer after a long week … I’m not proud.

Reading it now it sounds like I was rooting against Nau. Not the case. Sounded like an interesting and well-intentioned company. I was interested in it. Etc.

Second, it also sounds like I’m being rather more hostile toward cool-stuff blogs than I intended to be. Particularly given the fact that the only thing I linked to that hyped Nau was actually a trad-press article. I don’t have a problem with either cool-stuff blogs or trad-press mags advocating stuff they think is cool or noteworthy or whatever they want to do.

What I should have been clearer about is the difference between those approaches and what I do. Not that one is better than the other, but what I do is write about what people are buying — not about what I wish people were buying, or what I think they should buy. And this was the problem I was having with Nau. It sounded interesting, and the brand was coming up in lots of places, but I was not finding much in the way of actual consumer enthusiasm.

Consider, in contrast, the response to my recent blip here about the Flip camcorder: Several immediate responses from people who have bought it. Not that that’s definitive, but it syncs with the casual conversations I have etc., that people are really buying it and they’re really enthusiastic. I tried to find a pattern like that regarding Nau, but it just wasn’t there, as far as I could tell. It seemed to me that Nau was popular among certain entrepreneurs or marketers or other professional participants in consumer culture — which is interesting and legitimate, but doesn’t add up to something that I can, say, write about in Consumed.

That was the point of the original Nau post on this site, of course. If you read Murketing you know I float stuff all the time just to see what people say, and sometimes I later write about that something in the column. I had put Nau in the “wait and see” file. I guess that was the right call, but I could have expressed that better than I did last night.

For a more thoughtful response to the Nau news, see Indie Breakfast Club.