I suppose traditionally that’s what the blog format is meant for, to just kind of shit out everything you consume in the form of links and video embeds. But really that’s more like just “taking notes” at a lecture with a cassette recorder, see what I mean? That’s just transcription. I need something to do with it all. This problem is addressed to some extent by my meticulous music library curation with foobar, and my desperate calls recently for somebody to improve on the way we manage our music.

I think a prevailing problem is that of linearity; I can write a post on here, then another post, then another, and they appear chronologically in a line. Tagging and categorizing helps to make the content on here a little less linear, but it’s still not satisfying enough. I mean what I want is to be able to have some very loose, scrapbook-y interface where I can just kind of swim through collages of things: albums, journal entries. Snapshots of various aspects of certain time-periods. Paper is free-form enough to serve a purpose like this, but notebooks aren’t searchable or easily rearrangeable, and aren’t as ubiquitous as the web.

I actually am working on a new category in here that will present entries a little differently, to accommodate the kind of note-taking that I’m talking about, but even that’s too manual. Why can’t I, for instance, while listening to a D+ album in foobar, click something that will allow me to leave a note on it? The note will be linked to the album, to the song, to the artist, and to today’s date. Later that note will turn up in searches, and whenever I focus on this song/album/artist again. There are a couple solutions for this but all of them are inelegant.

It’s almost as though this whole paradigm of nodes needs to be re-thought. Nodes don’t adequately mimic the way we think, our brains aren’t that compartmentalized. When we are consciously focused on one thing, our attention is also inadvertently directed towards related things. For instance, when you think of an apple, you’re not likely thinking only of the qualities of an apple; a small if undetectable part of you is thinking about Snow White, thinking about Genesis, thinking about pears. And when does something like an apple evolve from a confluence of impressions — their taste, their color, their shape — into something as “node”-like as “an apple”? Is an apple categorized as “fruit” (which is itself a subcategory of “food”), and tagged as “crunchy,” “juicy,” “sweet,” etc.? Not exactly. And not to mention “an apple”’s faint associations with every experience you’ve had with one. Should those experiences be tagged “involved:apple”?

Simply put I guess it’s just a problem of memory. When I listen to an album for the first time, for instance, I never want to forget when I listened to it and what I thought of it. Yet I think it happens more often than not that when I listen to something, I forget sooner than later what I thought of it, or even that I listened to it at all.

A real-world example: I downloaded the new Evangelicals record some months ago. I listened to it once, and from what I can remember, I liked it a fair amount. But I never touched it again. I forgot they existed.

When they opened for Frog Eyes months later, I barely recognized the name. I seriously believed that I had only heard their name, but didn’t have a clue what they sounded like. It wasn’t until I was at the bar ordering a drink overhearing them play “Another Day” that it clicked. Since then I’ve listened to the album half a dozen or more times and found that I really enjoy it.

So, that’s a problem. What’s the solution?

I suppose I could have rated some of their songs when I first heard them. Looking at them now in my foobar, I see that “Another Day” is tagged with 4/5 stars. But when did I do that? I don’t know! I shouldn’t have to worry about these things.

What about a world in which, on some day a couple weeks after I first heard that record, I opened my media player and it presented me with that album, as if to ask me, “Hey, you listened to this album for the first time a few weeks ago, right after you downloaded it. You didn’t rate it; what did you think of it? Want to listen to it now to remind yourself?” It’s not that far-fetched an idea. But, again: media players are largely just spreadsheets.

What about all those movies I see thanks to Netflix? What happens to them years after I watch them? It’s as though I didn’t watch some of them at all. I remember seeing Alphaville sometime in 2005, for instance, but other than some vague imagery I’ve retained, I have no idea what that movie was like. Should I have written myself a short review of it after I watched it? Where would I have put it? What is the proper receptacle for that?

Somehow I’ve been trained to think that I should be not only capable of, but in fact actively thinking about everything I’ve experienced all the time. That’s sick, isn’t it? Is that a product of the internet? Over-stimulation? Is perfect recall too much to ask?

Most of the design was done first in GIMPShop, something I’ve been meaning to learn to use and actually made a lot of progress in today. IrfanView and Microsoft Paint just weren’t cutting it anymore.

The new comments section is pretty nice, with entirely image-based form fields, but unfortunately the arbitrary comments thing mentioned in the last post is going to take some more work that I really don’t want to do right now.

Also, Internet Explorer is a complete asshole.

All I did was create a “Page” (a technical WordPress term) called Arbitrary Comments, then, in the sidebar, call that page and load its comments with these simple lines:

<?php query_posts('page_id=120'); ?>
<?php the_post(); ?>
<?php comments_template(); ?>

I also implemented a PHP trick from Libertà to sort the retrieved comments in descending order of creation, as all good shoutboxes do.

Shoutboxes are an interesting new medium. And they really are new, I mean, nothing like them has ever really existed in the past. A comment in a shoutbox is a message that is ostensibly addressed to the owner of the shoutbox, but is intentionally public. The closest thing to this that I can think of are those dry erase boards people put on their doors in college, with a pen hanging from them so that anybody walking by could write something. Bystanders aren’t exactly part of the audience of the message, but there’s clearly something more compelling to this than email or private messaging.

It’s certainly one of the biggest draws of MySpace. Their commenting system makes every profile organic, alive, interactive. People attract comments more often than they update their profile themselves, and that’s one of the main reasons to check people’s profiles, which is about all you really do on MySpace. And there’s something more friend-like in opening up your personal page to the impulses of those people you’ve told MySpace are your “friends,” extending trust in the mutual creation of a page that is intended to define you.

I remember trying out Vox a couple months ago, which seems to market itself as something like MySpace with a heavier focus on blogging. I thought it would be perfect, but I soon realized that, at this point, unless your social networking site allows arbitrary comments, you’re not using a social networking site — you’re using a blogging site with tenuous little connections between members. And nobody cares about your fucking blog.