Yo, what up Monday morning merry makers?
Have you heard? MnSpeak is dead. Apparently it’s been devoured by The Rake and regurgitated as Secrets of the City.
From a personal aesthetic point of view I think the new site is fugly. As for the content, it seems like MnSpeak has long been leaning towards becoming a Rake and Strib aggregator so the change doesn’t suprise me at all.
What do you think? Love it or leave it?
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This is just awesome.
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I don’t mind it. It was time for a change. It was awesome when Rex started it, lame when Matt took it over, and Max brought it back to being decent. The Rake probably should have just bought it from Rex, instead of letting Matt run it, but oh well. I’ll still check it out for the occasional story.
The community of people is what makes/breaks forums like MnSpeak. I’m glad it didn’t just die and the community will still have a place to kvetch, troll and snark.
However, "Secrets of the City" is a stupid name. That’s a no-brainer.
I agree with Greg; the commenters make MNSpeak what it is; I think it’ll be all about whether they accept or reject the new format.
On the other hand, I really don’t get why they’d ditch both brands for a new one. And WHICH city is full of secrets?
Moe – I’m in the same boat. I’ve worked with enough psycho marketing people to question the brand changes and website looks come and go.I’m sure Max will keep things moving along. I guess we’ll see what happens.
Greg – The name is horrid. They should have called it "Secrets and the City" /sarcasm
Emily – I totally agree on the brands and my first thought upon reading the name was "which city"? Edina?
MNSpeak was kind of a secret of the city/cities, but once you out it like this then it doesn’t count!
I like the new design, and I also like the new technological advancements, such as having a username longer than 9 characters.
Wait, did I type 9? I meant 8.
I don’t like it. It’s a ham-handed attempt at folding MNspeak into some other website, and it’s really now just that site’s message boards. Whether it "works" or not is yet to be seen. Even if it does, it won’t be "the same". I even blocked it from my work computer, because there’s so much other junk there now that it quickly became far too distracting to visit during the work day(also partly in a nod to it’s connection to The Rake, richqb, holla!).
But I don’t oppose the Secrets of the City moniker as much as some. I think it’s kinda fitting description of a place you can go to find out about a city things you wouldn’t find in the tourism office brochure, if that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s something that could even be expanded to other cities. I’m traveling to some cities I’ve never been to next summer and would like it if there were a Secrets of the City – St. Louis or something.
Kev – I thought the same thing about expanding to multiple metros, sort of like a Metblogs. Heh.
The change sure is going to make it strange for Rake writers linking to their posts from MnSpeak. (richqb, holla!)
People’s opinions of it seem to be pretty closely tied to what they personally were putting into and getting out of it in the first place.
As someone who hasn’t and won’t ever contribute a post there because I have/had other places to do so, I’m not worried about what this says about who owns the content.
As someone who is a regular reader and kind-of regular commentor, I figure as long as Max keeps doin’ his thang and the other readers/commentors hang in there, it’ll be fine. It’s just putting the same forum in a different place, and it should actually function better.
So on balance I’m "meh" about it. *shrug*
@Erica – I’ll contribute there every now and again if I feel like a post fits better than at other places, but I’m not really concerened with content ownership. So I’m sure it’ll serve the same purpose for me.
As for the name change, I don’t think the new brand is as strong as either of the two prior brands.
Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that they allow anonymous comments again?