Social Bookmarking Soulmate

They say, when you're dating, if you like 90 percent of your potential partner, then keep him. Coach, is that true the social bookmarking dating world too? I've had luck finding valuable sites from educators regarding music education on delicious, but then I find that the bulk of their bookmarks are about smartboards or lesson plans. I also found a few useful and hip arts advocacy sites also, which I hope to discuss in later posts. I liked ten to 15 percent--not enough to keep.

Nevertheless, I found a soulmate that fit the "90 percent" criteria. After scavenging through what look to be her personal sites, (email, googlereader, etc), I found that the remainder of mezzamoah's bookmarks were relevant, but more importantly, interesting.

Mezzamoah has a whopping 59 bookmarks, but she has 79 tags--well organized to boot. This makes it incredibly easy to navigate her bookmarks. I was able to find several websites regarding classical music, popular music, music reviews as well as avante-garde music. Unfortunately, she lacks articles regarding education, but from my research, it seems to be a different demographic. Her activity is recent, although I was unable to figure out whether or not she commented often, which may be indicative of my inexperience with this social bookmarking dating system. (Or perhaps a fault of only using delicious without Diigo as a supplementary tool).

An example of a fascinating website mezzamoah revealed to me is indabamusic--a venue for artists to collaborate and produce music entirely over the internet. Artists create profiles, find each other online, hold recording sessions and publish their music to the public via the website. Once the music is public, users can comment on eachother's creations. Many of the users are jazz musicians and students. Musicians, especially in college, love to experiment; music is always changing! This is a fantastic invention for musicians to collaborate with people from all over the country. Although I am recently introduced to the concept, it appears to have been a hit for some time: the website also features contests where musicians compete to collaborate with professionals like John Legend, The Roots and Yo-Yo Ma. The homepage shows promotional quotes from Stephen Colbert, ABC News and Wired.

As far as classical music, her bookmarks are mainly music critic blogs and new music websites. Music critic for The New Yorker, author and avid blogger, Alex Ross, has a great blog about opera, symphony and other classical music happenings around New York. He also posts his collegues's as well as his own articles from the magazine. Some of his posts include books or playlists of music he recommends. There don't seem to be any free downloads, but the cultural influence is always appreciated, right? And even though mezzamoah's bookmarks doesn't provide me with to many education and advocacy sites, Ross's blogroll definitely does.

For my readers, mezzamoah and the sites she bookmarks can be helpful on two accounts. 1) Although her bookmarks may not be completely devoted to classical music, they seem to be innovative and thought provoking sites, (like this and this). 2) She is a person interested in the avante-garde, rock and roll and classical--relatively common and admirable interests for all well-bred musicians.

Because she seems to be on top of the evolutions of contemporary rock, classical and popular music critique, as well as music-making inventions, her bookmarks will be helpful in fulfilling my desire to be "cutting edge" as well as thoughtful in my blog. My mother's friend once told me, "If a relationship makes it to the six month mark, then it's going to be long term." I have high hopes for my relationship with mezzamoah and in order to broaden my spectrum of topics, I hope the feelings are mutual!