Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll

Fans will be the most comprehensive curators

There's a section in my book called "Creating and Curating the Archive" where I wrote,

In future, if they’re not already, fan communities will quickly become the most authoritative archivists for the artists they follow. They collect memorabilia and ephemera — from ticket stubs to magazine interviews and amateur bootleg recordings — that most people would dismiss as tat… As well as memorabilia, these items will include what are currently rare and hard-to-find audio and video recordings, which will be collected by both human foraging and automated 'sweeping' of the Net. Expert fans will catalogue them and record their digital fingerprints, to help identify whether further discoveries are duplicates or new additions to the archive.

Many of my projections in this area were based on observing the way Andy Aldridge has developed the Head Full of Wishes fansite for Galaxie 500 and associated 'downstream' acts. I profiled Andy in the book and also in this interview.

Yesterday Andy posted to the Head Full of Wishes mailing list about a new tagging framework he's created for the site. This enables him to ensure that his site is able firstly to collect details of everything that's out there on the Net and is connected to Galaxie 500, and secondly to organise and present that information in a coherent way. As he wrote,

I did this because I was finding interesting stuff "out there", tagging it in delicious and it was quietly getting lost now I can "catalogue" everything — if I find a video on youtube of Dean & Britta doing Tugboat [a Galaxie 500 song] in London (I wish) I can tag it with the relevant show and track tags and it will always be available of the page of that show (and that track)…

Rough notes: two recent music events

There are a few rules of thumb I use to filter what I write on this site. The first is that it must have some bearing on the themes of digital discovery in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book. The second is that I don't really do 'news' items here, unless I come across something that I believe deserves higher profile than it's likely to get from other channels. If you want news, you're better off going to a site that specialises: I use mediaor (built by Jason Herskowitz), which aggregates material from about a hundred music news and discovery sites (including this one!). Thirdly, I always try and add something new to the 'raw data' in terms of analysis or insight — or, when I'm lacking insight, attitude.

But often I don't have time to digest what I take in, or to compose my thoughts. That's life, and we all probably feel that way, so no complaints. But I'm always experimenting with ways to make something useful out of the undigested stuff, to provide a 'light touch' way of passing things on. The 'recently noted elsewhere' stream on the right of this page is one example of that, based on a subset of my Furl archive. Another thing I do is take rough notes at the conferences, lectures and other events I attend. I'm trying out using my Vox blog to make these available in unedited form. The notes are rough, messy and come with health warnings about accuracy. But have a peek and see if you find these two examples useful:

• Music Connected — AIM independent label event last week, including Paul Brindley's state-of-the-digital-industry review and a panel on ad-supported models;
• Celestial Jukebox: free streams or pipe dreams? — Music Tank event yesterday, with keynote from Last.fm and responses from labels, rights organisations and technologists.

If you're feeling nosey, there's also a mix of other personal stuff on the same blog (and if you become a friend of mine on Vox, there's even more embarrassing stuff).