Two quick quizzes on two topic domains close to your heart:

1. What is the most popular link in all of blog-space right
at this moment?2. What is the fastest rising blog story in all of blog-space right now?

Depending on whether you check Blogdex or Daypop you may get different answers, but they are both good answers. One candidate for the first answer is this quiz about 80's pop lyrics and the second is a flash animation, something about what Neil Armstrong really said on the Moon -- easy enough, effortless really. Let's move on to the second quiz:

1. Who are the most loved mariachi band in all of recorded music right
at this moment?2. Who are the fastest rising unsigned recording artists in Central America?

Before you crack open the latest Billboard, tell me, are you really going to trust the wolves to count the sheep?

Now here's a side question: Which quiz is really more important to the way you live your life? Fortunately, the answer for one is topologically just as easy to get as the answer for the other ...

And here's the inside track on how to get that answer ...
h3. Cream Rises, Sludge Sinks

So here it is, hypothetically, an open portal where anybody can post any recorded music they like so long as they have properly prepped the MP3 file, hosted it somewhere reliable and taken the effort to have their own publishing system tell the central blogroll that the new track is there. I could be their dog singing Handel, it could be the most amazing jaw-harp you've ever heard, but the machine doesn't care, it just plunks the link down with the excerpt summary and there it is, and here comes another one, and another.

Relentless, 7×24, track after track after track.

The thing is, somebody liked that track, and you never know who else might like the same track. Late night once long ago, May and I heard the overnight CBC host playing this cassette from some kid in the Southwest USA, wailing on his untuned guitar, moanful teen angst droning. The host was having a hoot, this recording was just so bad she felt compelled to share it with a coast-to-coast audience. We promptly forgot it, but I confess, partly because, out near Caledon Ontario, CBC is about the only listenable station at that hour, but yes, we also listened because, well, it was so staggeringly bad that we were stunned that anyone would commit it to tape.

But they did, and, apparently, it attained somewhat of a cult stature.

One of my all-time favourite songwriters was Albert Wade Hemsworth a songwriter most famous for the "Logdriver's Waltz" that became an NFB cartoon, but who was also much revered by Canadian folkies of the middle 70's. Wade didn't really record until he retired, and by then, he had a weak voice accompanied only by his 6-string guitar. Not the sort of thing that would attract the attention of Teen Idol, and sure enough, long since out of print except for copies you can still buy from his family. But the songs are killers.

In an earlier post I wrote about Clay Shirkey's landmark blog-tech paper on how the weblog is a self-annealing content management system, or as the k-bloggers would like corporate euramerica to admit, it is a knowledge management system par excellance because it uses real intelligence to do the sifting, not robot AI.

[removed music/mikado.jpg]

AI cannot reliably screen email spam, but you put something before a few thousand people and ask them to give it a rating, and, like it or not, you get an answer pretty fast.

This self-annealing of the rating statistic is an inescapable and natural by-product of the Fast One-Track Publishing Universe -- the root node may appear as chaotic as weblogs.com, and that is the way it should be because it is from that raw stew that thousands of listeners pull what attracts them, and from what they say about it we beat Billboard at their own game.