So the question of who do we actually write for was posed by Mark Artrip in a comment this morning. Also there is Jason Rice’s most recent post that addresses the issue of bringing out your own personality in a blog and deciding how much to really care. Really, I do not have any answer to the questions yet but maybe I can work through it quickly and for your own amusement. I think there are a couple of scenarios that I will explore before I define this whole blogging thing for myself.

1. I write this for other tech nerds. Sure there is the discussion about who should be called nerd or geek or whatever, or even if the nerd label has gotten “too cool” as was mentioned in this last issue of Wired magazine. I think that the problem with writing for tech nerds would be that tech people already dominate the internet in almost every way imaginable so what do I really have to add that is not somewhere else? Any foray into making this an actual tech blog would result in 200 links to sources in every post and that is way too much work for my level of dedication to this blogging endeavor.
2. I write this for general consumption. This is a strong contender because I do consider myself at least semi-well rounded in a lot of different areas. Over enough time I think that I will have probably covered a very broad spectrum of categories and part of my hope would be that I could offer some small additional insight or perspective to whatever it is that I am talking about at that moment. Maybe I am not really cool enough or have enough “experience” or whatever to have anybody listen to me but I don’t care. Whatever.
3. I write this for my friends. I subscribe to several different blogs of close friends and I find it interesting to keep in touch this way. I do not have to feel bad about not calling and really when you think about it, blogging is just long-hand multi-media capable texting. I think a primary purpose is to let my friends, especially long distance ones, know how things are going in my life.
4. I write this for myself. Maybe this is the acceptable nerdy way of keeping a diary, or at least fulfilling the same purpose in a physiological sense that writing in a diary would meet. Does that mean that I am going to spew forth my thoughts unfiltered to the whole world? Certainly not. Does it mean that I can use this place as a space to quickly post my thoughts on a subject for quick reference at a later point? Absolutely.

So I read this blog which is published only when they have something really perfect. The most recent post was for New Balance sneakers. 

I have to say that after reading it I was not as impressed as with some of the other posts that they have had. Maybe my friends are not quite that white but I will agree with the part about sneakers by the door, there is always at least one pair. 

So if you are white and have shoes go check out this post. It is at least worth the read.

Recently I posted about how much I like the Raconteurs new album Consolers of the Lonely. Nice little post. In an off the cuff sort of way I said:

Ok so I am not as huge a fan of music as my good friend Mark Artrip but I do have a bigger iTunes music library…not that I’m keeping track.

Now I did not necessarily mean for that to start a “mine is bigger than yours contest” because I thought that it would just be accepted at face value by whomever chose to read my blog. I now realize that Mark does take music much more seriously than I do and so he commented:

wait a minute, I would like to know how big your itunes library is? and if it is bigger than mine, I would like to know how much of that music you obtained legally. I like to think that I have one of the biggest legal libraries around….all terrible christian music from back in the day….but still:)

Now I will say to start off with that a blog on the internet popular or not is probably not the best place for anyone to quantify or justify the status of what is contained in their collection of media no matter what the format. What I will say is that I have never counted a library that way because honestly, I have moved my music around so much to so many different computers and in different formats that I am not sure anyone could really tell what is from where other than what I have bought from the iTMS itself. So for just the sake of defining legality lets say that only songs purchased from iTunes count since if you believe the record labels importing off of your own cds breaks copyright since it constitutes a change in format and is thus illegal. In that arguement I have 156 songs which take up 562.7MB of space and would take 9.5 hours to listen to. Not that much. Here are screengrabs of my overall library.

A lot of this actually has been ripped off of CDs or DVDs that I owned (and since got rid of because CDs take up space) at one time. Most of the stuff that I got in college has been long since deleted as my overall storage capacity expanded or contracted. I will say that changing from a desktop to a laptop prompted me to unload a huge amount of content both in the tv shows area and in music. Things like the entire audio books for the LOTR trilogy added a ridiculous number of tracks and play time to the stats. I have also been getting rid of a lot of albums that quite frankly I will never listen to again and am not even sure where they came from. 

As a wrap up to this post about music and libraries let me include a link to an amazing post that I read this morning on this very subject. Below is one of my favorite quotes from it but you can read the whole thing here if you want.

Because of the availability of music online, a very strict social hierarchy has been created within white culture whereby someone with a large MP3 collection is considered “normal,” a large CD collection is considered to be “better,” and a person with a large vinyl collection is recognized as “elite.”