Frontotemporal Dementia In The Morning
I walk in a maze and I talk in a daze… This morning involved waking up at the not very reasonable hour of 0415 in order to ship my girlfriend off to the bus station. Five hours to NYC, five hours back again with an ETA of about 1am. Driving back up again at that infidelic hour, watching the recycling trucks doing their duty in the not quite dawn, the radio was cranking out mad choonz: in this particular case, Bolero. This did not seem appropriate back then in the grey! Bolero is not morning music.
In fact, Bolero is surprisingly not very classical sounding. It’s one of the few pieces which has a serious beat to it. I totally had not noticed this until blearily navigating back over the bridge this morning. Perhaps this is why it was one of the first classical pieces I remember having a bit of thing for, back in the heady days of primary school. One of our teachers (Mrs. Cook, I think. She was old and people were scared of her) liked to play something culturally significant when we were marching into assembly on Wednesdays. This one time she picked Bolero, and I distinctly remember her remark about how we were all marching in on that ante m., and also memorizing the name of the piece because I thought it was cool. That was… errr…. (calculate calculate) about twenty years ago. Good god I’m getting old and scary myself.
That made me start thinking about twentieth century music in general, and why it is particularly appealing to me, and whether that might be in part due to an increased use of percussion. Is there in fact an increased use of percussion? It’s something that I’ve never really been listening for, up until now with Bolero’s sneaky little suggestions in that direction. I’ll be keeping my ears open in a specific way for a bit from now on.
Debatage
Holy crap guys! ACD and I are currently up to 13 comments worth of argument on yesterdays post about blog rankings. He insists that the number of Google incoming links is “universally accepted as a measure of importance” and the others are fairly useless. I believe that the incoming links are considered “important” in the sense that this is what gives you a good placement in Google. It indicates how many other classical music bloggers are linking to you, but certainly does not tell you how objectively “important” a website is (and extra-certainly not universally so.)
Personally, the number of people reading what I write here is more important to me then the number of links I get, and I think that the Google Reader and Bloglines subscriber numbers give a fairly decent indication of this. ACD disagrees that the RSS numbers are at all useful and claims that the number of incoming links is the only statistically “clean” method.
So what do you guys think? Are RSS subscribers a useful metric to you, or do you prefer incoming Google links?
Ranking Oversaturation
There is a negative aspect to all of the blog ranking which has been going on here, and other places recently. I don’t think it’s too awful an effect, but it’s all just a tiny little bit cheapening, this who has the most popular blog malarkey. Maybe it’s just because my eyes have been exposed to too many of these lists in the last few days, but it feels just a little bit sad to see all of those numbers next to everyones efforts. There is something uncomfortable about quantifying the writing that people have put in pretty much purely because they are passionate about the subject.
Patty at Oboeinsight feels similarly, I think:
Sure, it’s fun to be able to see that some people read this little blog. But really, would I stop blogging if I didn’t make the list? Heck no.
Which I suspect is how almost everyone else either on or off the list feels. I hope so anyway. It’s sort of hard to divorce yourself from this where-am-I-placed type of attitude when the numbers are right in front of you though, and I confess that I will be vigorously scanning any more of these that are published to find my own little website amongst all the others.
I think it’s really important to treat these rankings as vaguely indicative, and not the be-all/end-all of anything. While it’s nice to have a measure of how far an outreach you have compared to others, it’s probably not a good thing to take it terribly seriously. Or at all seriously, in fact.
Perhaps I’m just feeling a little mopey and hypocritical on the cusp of another Monday.
The Top 50 Classical Blogs, Using 4 Different Methods
Some of you will probably have noticed that a couple of days ago ACD decided to release his own list of the 50 top classical music blogs (which incidentally should more properly be called the top 53, using his current dense-ranking method) based on the number of incoming links according to the god of the internet, Google. In the process he somewhat pissed off a few people, notably Scott over at Musical Perceptions who has been compiling his own rankings for the last couple of years (using the Technorati authority number) but whom ACD neglected to credit with prior art (there is a rather bitter exchange in the comments over at Musical Perceptions here). Also myself (though I’d say it’s irritated then pissed off) due to refusing to use the URL which everybody actually links to in their blogroll to determine the number of incoming links. However, it is his blog, his screening choices, his rankings list.
Well, it occurred to me that since I spend every day managing large chunks of data and automating stuff I could probably whip up a script which automatically calculates my own classical blog rankings, according to my own choices. So I did exactly that. There may be a couple of bugs still, if you find anything in error please let me know so I can patch it up. I was particularly interested in trying to perform this in the most scientific way possible, so I’ve used four distinct methods of ranking. There is the Google incoming links method (as ACD uses), the Technorati authority method (which Scott uses) but additionally I use Bloglines RSS feed subscribers (which Chris Foley did once) and a completely new method, which is the number of Google Reader subscribers.
Now, I’m considering this a bit of a beta-test since I probably missed a few blogs which should have been included (I tried to combine ACD’s list and the Musical Perceptions list, along with a bunch of others, the complete list I used is here, add yours if I’m missing it please!) and there might be a couple of mistakes. While the program I use obviously has a larger chance of having a bug then a human does (depending upon caffeine ingested), the huge advantage is that it only takes around five minutes to collect and analyze all the data for about 100 blogs. What I’d like is for people to suggest improvements, for example, should I combine the results together to produce a super-ranking? Should I combine the RSS feed data with the Technorati authority to give a “current readership” number? If people are interested I’ll polish it up and analyze it differently.
So without further ado, here are the “top” 50 blogs as of yesterday using four different ranking methods, the first number next to each blog is it’s rank, the number in parentheses is the total number of subscribers, number of incoming links, etc.
Google Reader Subscriptions
Technorati Authority
Google Incoming Links
Bloglines Subscribers
Blogs Used For Calculating Rankings
These are the blogs I have used for calculating the top 50 classical music blogs with, if yours isn’t on here and should be, stick it in the comments.