Hello, Tongs mainstays and new web-faring friends! Welcome to Tongs 2.0: Music Blogging through Social Bookmarking. You’re probably wondering just what the hell I mean by that, so allow me to explain.
I’ve been struggling to come up with good, consistent content for this blog for a while now. If any of you have seen my frequent bemoanings of my utter lack of time, you know how that’s contributed to my absence as well. But I hardly wanted to watch Tongs whither away into nothingness – I did put a large amount of work into it this summer, and who could forget the day my hipster-incensing “Allston Ladies’ Room” post netted me over 3,000 pageviews in one day? So, I started brainstorming ways I could still keep a music blog updated regularly and with a substantial volume of high-quality content. I also wanted to incorporate a hint of my library school learnings into this project, and one of the main things we’re all excited about in the LIS field right now is social bookmarking. If you have no clue what that is, here’s Wikipedia’s definition:
“Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.”
Basically, you “socially bookmark” when you want to show someone else how you found certain content – like a song, for instance – rather than sending or sharing the actual file. Think of it as the hand-drawn treasure map of the 21st century. Anyway, all of my brain-scratching eventually led me to the idea that I, me, yours truly, could combine music blogging and social bookmarking into one cohesive project here on Tongs.
The plan – or the challenge, which may be the more accurate way of putting it – is for me to write short review-blurbs about one, two, or three songs* a day. Any songs, from any point in history. That may not sound so revolutionary in and of itself, but here’s the kicker: I’ll also be providing a link (or more than one, if relevant) to where my visitors can hear each of the songs I’ve written about. That’s where the social bookmarking thing comes in, and that’s also what’ll prevent WordPress from blowing the whistle on me if Tongs ever gets popular.
As a sidebar, I’ve set up a Delicious account (at http://www.delicious.com/tastytastytunes) where I’ll be bookmarking all of the links I list in the blog as well for quick and easy reference. I’ve never used Delicious before this, so it’ll be a learning experience for me, too.
The main intent of this experiment is to add more value to my posts by allowing readers to actually experience the songs I laud on this site. Of course, there are plenty of MP3 blogs knocking around out there that make this easier than Tongs 2.0 will, but I want to do this in a way that’s most fair to both the musicians I’m featuring here and my fellow users of the web.
Where I do believe in the idea of open access, and that the copyright laws in this country are long overdue for an update, I don’t want to sit here and illegally share music at the risk of harming the same artists I’m exalting in my posts. Whether or not you “believe” in buying music at a CD shop or pirating it via BitTorrent is your business. I’ve got no agenda, just curiosity to see if a) doing this successfully is possible, b) doing it is even a good idea at all, and c) I can come up with enough songs that are actually worth recommending!
If you have any questions, ideas, or other comments about the Tongs 2.0 project, please let me know. I’m especially interested to see if other people will even find this useful or attention-worthy. I’ll shut up for now, but one last thing to know: my three-posts-a-day ultimatum kicks into effect starting tomorrow. Stay tuned!
* My original intent was to post three songs every day, but I’ve scaled it back to make this a bit more realistic for me. I knew you’d understand.
