Shared-discovery blogging

I’ve found a new iTunes-compatible public radio station, KCRW from Santa Monica, CA. It’s a good station for me because it’s in the Pacific zone, so they’re playing early morning stuff in my early morning. I still like WNYC, WAMU and WBUR, but they’re on the other coast.

Anyway…

I’ve heard it said that blogs are about conversations — I’ve never agreed with this.

I’ve seen people complain that if I don’t say things they can react to then they have nothing to say — I don’t pity them.

Hey there are already lots of ways of having conversations on the net, email, IM, mail lists, usenet. We hardly need another way to have conversation.

I blog to share discoveries, large and small, mundane and profound and everything inbetween.

Then search engines can pick up my observations, and make them available to others.

The better search gets, the more valuable blogs become.

Here’s an example. This morning I started listening to KCRW in Santa Monica, a Los Angeles public radio station. Now, a few hours later I’m listening to a music show that’s got all this interesting pop music, stuff you never hear on public or commercial radio elsewhere. In Boston, you get classical on WGBH. At WAMU in DC, which may be the closest public radio station to the Appalachians, you get excellent bluegrass. I bet if Nashville has a public radio station they do country and western. Well, Los Angeles is the HQ for pop music, and presumably draws people who are interested in new stuff that they might be able to sell to everyone else, so you get world pop. Very interesting stuff. What a surprise, but then if you think about, not a surprise at all.

See how that’s not part of a conversation? I’m not calling some other blogger a bad name, or saying he or she is stupid, or whatever. I’m not trying to get on Memeorandum. But maybe some search engine will come along and figure out that there’s some data here, it might connect some dots between various public radio stations based on the kind of music they play. Then when someone wants to know about it they’ll find it.

Maybe the best blogger for shared discovery blogging is Phillip Greenspun in Cambridge. I think he even once wrote a piece like this one where he explained that blogging, to him, is kind of a responsibility for a curious person who does interesting things, or even someone who does mundane things but has a curious way of looking at the world.