On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground released 4 studio albums that were each different in style and themes. Likewise in the tech blogging world, Don Park has recently written an album full of posts about Wikis, Dave Winer is in the midst of recording his thoughts on political blogs, Jon Udell has written a variety of classics on topics such as Universal Canvas. There are even the blogging equivalent of Unplugged albums – check out Mark Pilgrim’s These Days.
Currently I’m writing on topics such as microcontent and the two-way web. Perhaps I’ll start writing weblog “albums” – there’ll be about 10 posts per album and each album will have a different unifying theme. For example: literary blogging is a theme I’m keen to explore. Or I could write a series of posts on the Semantic Web. I’ve already written a single post (a “song”) about the SemWeb, so I could extend that into a whole RDF phase.
Now I just need to get my album covers sorted. Unfortunately with blogging that means getting stuck into CSS and XHTML 🙂
ps this post was partly inspired by a radio interview I heard recently on Radio Active, a Wellington student radio station. The interview was with New Zealand musician Scott Mannion, who goes by the recording name The Tokey Tones. Scott said that he likes to come up with an idea for an album theme first, then record it using whatever musicians best fit the theme, and lastly get a band together to promote the album on tour. So he doesn’t have a band in the traditional sense, he is part of a ‘community of musicians’. For example members of The Brunettes helped him record his latest albums. The Brunettes, fyi, are another New Zealand band and they sound like a cross between The Velvet Underground and bubblegum pop (literally, the lead male singer has got the Lou Reed thing going on in both voice and guitar). They’re fantastic and unique…if you’re looking for some original kiwi music to listen to, check it out.