Have any of you seen this before? Night Owl’s post on the slick new version of iTunes reminded me that I’d come across this application a little while ago and meant to blog about it. Basically, it’s a flash-based player with an interface designed to look just like one of the pretty new video iPods (you get to choose whether you want the black or the white model), and it offers an amazingly extensive library of FREE streaming content -- I was seriously impressed by how many of my requests it was able to come up with.

I ran into this article from the New York Times a few days ago, which seems pretty relevant to the overall discussion of the fragmentation of self expression online.

It deals with the ways in which the democratization of self-expression on the internet interact with the "professionalism" and business of artistic production. What I found most interesting was the notion that while the internet creates a sense of cultural fragmentation (ie. there is no one song that everybody is listening to, and there are a million songs that small groups are listening to), "Even if they take pride in ignoring the mass-market Top 10, users still want a little company, and perhaps they hope that the collective choices add up to some guidance." In other words, fragmentation online does not reach the level of the individual. Rather than resolutely avoiding a group cultural dynamic, users seek out a smaller niche.

I was hanging around with a friend last night, poking about on the internet (the fact that surfing the net is social activity...can of worms I'm not going to tackle at the moment), and found a youtube video someone had linked to. Nothing particularly profound or interesting, an upload of a music* video, about 4 minutes long. The song was repetitive and the concept behind the video revealed itself very quickly, and I soon lost interest. My friend made a comment about short attention span.

I don't know if it's that I never really "got in to" to the whole music videos thing, or that as part of the post-mtv generation, my attention cannot be held by even the shortest of sustained stimuli.

I realized that I didn't do any linking in my previous post, so here's an addendum of sorts. I've found it hard to get into personal blogs (ironic considering that I just posted a fairly long personal story about blogs), so I tried searching for blogs about some of my interests, which seems to be something of a common approach here. I settled on music, so I went searching for music blogs.

A number of music blogs seem to be personal blogs that happen to link to mp3s. A good example of this is the horribly named Rawkblog. Much like your typical personal blog, whoever keeps this blog seems to seek approval through posting music that establishes him or her as some kind of music connoisseur. Additionally, the author attempts to establish a relationship between his or her personal life and the music that is posted.