Progressive Rock

Boston.
OK. 11.5 days of writing (I started on 23 May), for 14 hours straight on some days - all up I've been writing for about 143 hours so far, Word tells me (that's 12.5 hours per day, on average). 363 pages. 156,000 words. That's 1090 words per hour, but includes quotes, of course. 12 chapters written so far, and four more to go. If I haven't blogged for a while, it's because I've used up my allocation of words for the day.

So, writing the produsage book is going OK, but it will need some editing - the final book is supposed to be only 300 pages, or 135,000 words. (Hey, I could stop right now...) Just as well, though, because it's not quite right in a few places yet, and I'm throwing in altogether too many quotes at times. That's always been an issue for me - lots of research, lots of interesting quotes from the research, and I'd love to use them all, but I can't let them overwhelm what I'm actually trying to say. So, I'm learning to throw out more than I'm using. Slowly.

I was interviewed for an ABC Online science story the other day, about an article published by a number of physicists recently. Not the most likely story to comment on for an Internet researcher, you might think (even if, as it turns out, my first degree was in physics) - but what's happened here is that the researchers in question have applied complex network theory to the musicians' database of the All Music Guide (AMG), which both tracks collaborations between musicians and provides recommendations of musical similarity made by its panel of expert contributors. What's come out of this are two datasets, one indicating the network of collaborations across the 30,000-odd musicians tracked by AMG, and one showing the similarities between these artists as AMG's pundits see them.

A few days ago, I received some nice email feedback for a review of King Crimson's 2003 album The Power to Believe, which I'd published in M/C Reviews at the time. Michael Cussen wrote to me:

Very good review of Power to Believe. Did you send it to DGM?

I hadn't, but I've now sent off a quick message to Sid Smith, Crimso biographer and currently helping to build the upcoming new Website for their record label Discipline Global Mobile. I'm also including pointers to two earlier pieces for PopMatters:

I've finally written my review of the new Paatos album - this has been sitting here for some months now, and I just never got around to it. It's now been published on M/C Reviews, but here it is as well: