At the risk of going off-topic, I’m currently deeply into IMHO the best album I’ve heard in years – Green Day’s American Idiot. It’s a concept album and I often wonder how such a thing could be done in blogging. It’s common wisdom that a focused blog is the best way to gain a following in the ‘sphere. But I reckon bloggers could complement their chosen topic by producing concept-driven ‘blog albums’ from time to time. I wrote about this a year and a half ago, in a post comparing blogs to albums. While my position has changed on a couple of points in that Sept 2003 post, this extract illustrates what I mean:
“…in the tech blogging world, Don Park has recently written an album full of posts about Wikis, Dave Winer is in the midst of recording his thoughts on political blogs, Jon Udell has written a variety of classics on topics such as Universal Canvas. There are even the blogging equivalent of Unplugged albums – check out Mark Pilgrim’s These Days.”
While I encourage ambitious bloggers to be topic-focused, variety is the spice of life. An excellent way to keep things interesting is to explore a different concept every week or month (or whatever time period suits you). I have to keep reminding myself of this too. As I said in the Sept 03 post:
“Perhaps I’ll start writing weblog “albums” – there’ll be about 10 posts per album and each album will have a different unifying theme.”
Hmmm. I have some ideas about how to do this in my Web 2.0-focused blog. Stay tuned 😉
bonus link: Wikipedia list of concept albums. Includes this description of the Green Day album: “A Bay Area suburbanite named Jesus of Suburbia flees his broken home to experience city life, transforming into the rebellious St. Jimmy. Notable as a punk rock opera.” More here (I heart Wikipedia).
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)