a few other things repeatedly fail to get mentioned though…

1. Stack the critics & bloggers charts up to sales and a whole other story emerges. You may say people are like sheep, but hey at least the sheep know what they like and guess what its not the sucky music you “cool” people listen to

2. It’s a shame that the 1000s of music bloggers who dedicate themselves to obscure genres and eras get completely glossed over by the few 100 music bloggers posting popular/current music. Not to mention the really underground blogs, like in hip hop blog rings where you can click thru a dozen blogs that are all generic black & white backgrounds with just about a zillion underground hip hop albums since the 70s you never heard of… so i wouldn’t necessarily take this sampling of the tastes of the few and generalize it to what I see as a very healthy nebulously sprawling international community of music fans sharing their idiosyncratic tastes and interests… just like the rest of the blogosphere outside of indie music… i mean its like calling the World Series the World Series

3. What about your REALLY average folks, who throw in an mp3 or “what i’m listening to” in every few posts on what is mostly their personal blog (i.e. not a “music blog”)..

anyway im not sure what im venting against – pro’lly just procrastinating from piled up work – but yea i like Klaxons too.

FYI, we did include Livejournal/Myspace posts….anybody that submitted a top 10 albums list, ranked and readable were included.

Also, while we were pretty open to submissions for our blog zeitgeist, we are fairly strict about inclusion on our everyday Hype Machine blog list ( [hypem.com] , which is the blogs we crawl every day). We don’t include “really average folks who throw in an mp3 every few posts on what is mostly their personal blog”. They must write primarily about music, have a genuine interest in supporting the artists (aka no “full album blogs”) and have been writing for 3-6 months (so we know they are committed).

That said, I agree that it can get annoying that some music blogs all write about the same stuff. This is a big reason behind us creating personalized pages ( like [hypem.com] ) where you can “favorite” specific blogs and friends and basically get a custom homepage with music from people who’s taste you appreciate.

One rule states the following.

No myspace, no LiveJournal. Myspace makes it too easy to ballot-stuff; just bulk-mail all your “friends” and ask them to put X on their top ten list.

Is this something one would do to rise in the MBZ poll? I can’t really believe that this would happen often. Or are they worried about this as something that happens independently? Further, maybe such people really do ‘like’ the bands (i.e. they like them because their friends are in them) I can’t believe that this never happens elsewhere. It just seems that including Myspace lists would increase the representativeness of the sample. This is imporatant since MBZ claims to aspire to track “popular” music. Who cares if you tabulate the results using 50 or 5 million blogs if most come from people who share similar tastes in music (I’m guessing that this is so with the blogs used. I could be wrong.)