Don’t know if you’ve noticed… but New Music Strategies posts have been pretty thin on the ground of late. In a way, that’s been a really great thing, because the comments have come in and taken over.
It seems I now write a 500 word post, and 50,000 words of really smart, critical thinking over a wide range of opinion kicks in from all around the internet.
Can’t ask for better than that.
Annual reflection
Every year around this time (a bit earlier usually, actually) I sort of second-guess myself, change tack and end up doing something different to whatever I did the year before. It’s taken me all the way through to the end of January to figure out what that is this time around.
But in part, my apparent waywardness on the blogging front has been part of a concerted attempt to get 2009 all in order before I really commit to it. I’ve had quite a few projects hanging around that I wanted to close off, a couple that I needed to walk away from – and one or two that I had to consider very closely.
It all involved a good deal of soul-searching, reflection and mapping things out on bits of paper. In fact, I had to give myself the kind of intensive consultancy I often give other people.
You’ll be pleased (I hope) to hear that New Music Strategies is continuing and has survived the rather brutal culling process that saw the demise of several of my most beloved but less rewarding ventures. But I’m not promising any resurgence of effort or amped-up regularity of posting. In fact, I’m even reneging on a couple of things.
I’m not going to write that book
I don’t know if you remember, but I was going to write a book. Those ‘Questions I Keep Getting Asked About Music Online’? There were going to be 100 of them.
I was going to say what I thought, and then once everything was all written, I was going to bundle it all up and turn it into another ebook for your downloading pleasure.
But you know what happened? You guys came along and made it better. Even when you disagreed vehemently with my central point, having that range of opinion available here massively contributed to the value of every single post.
Remember when I talked about copyright being 5 years long? 140-odd comments. Most of them longer than the post. That’s an amazing ROI for a blogger. Most of them disagreed with me, but I was making a provocative point, and the debate made the internet just that little bit smarter.
So… I think we should all write a book together.
We can bring up the different opinions and viewpoints and try and manage that in a dispassionate way as best as we can, but we can reflect the range of viewpoints within each topic as we go.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to draw your attention to the all-new, completely fresh out of the box…
Click the link, and then go ahead and start tapping away at it. I’ll be adding stuff in there too – bits and pieces of knowledge from blog posts gone by, new snippets of information and opinion – and you can add to, change and develop anything that’s in there.
I’ve set it up so that I’ll be able to bring bits of the wiki into the blog as well – so any really interesting and apropos bits of information and insight will appear as guest posts here – though they’ll be guest posts that may change over time as new authors edit and rearrange the text.
But for now, it’s so very brand new, I’ve hardly had a chance to take the plastic off.
Look forward to seeing what we come up with. Oh, and (finally) Happy New Year.