Music on a musician's blog--who would have thought?

I've recently been playing with widgets and Blogger gadgets, trying to figure out how they work and how they'll help me become a better blogger. Many of the widgets I come across fascinate me at first, and I'm tempted to add them all and see how they change over time (in the news feed gadget, for one, I can see the headlines of the blog I've chosen to link to change every time I log on to Blogger).

But now that I've tried so much of it out, I've been thinking about which widgets will be useful in the long term. Some are fun to play with, but adding them all makes a reader overwhelmed by all the sections on your page. Better to pick the widgets that best serve the topic you're blogging about.

I think that, in this age where people are just starting to blog and are experimenting with all these new add-ons, there's too much emphasis on what you can do and not enough on what actually fits. For example, it's cool to post a link to the day's most popular YouTube videos or include an RSS feed of the latest sports headlines, but if your blog is about classical music, of what interest are these add-ons to your readers?

Because I'm thinking about writing--and probably blogging--about classical music in the future, I've wondered what sorts of music-related widgets I can add to enhance my blog. I've seen some classical music bloggers link to related Web sites that their readers might find interesting in a blogroll, and I've seen RSS feeds from The New York Times' classical music section, but I think some of these bloggers have neglected the coolest, most useful widget: the embedded mp3 player.



This particular player won't play anything because I haven't attached an mp3 file to it. (I would if I could, but while I'm in Italy, I have no access to the digital music files on my laptop at home.) But in my opinion, finding the mp3 player is the hard part, and selecting one to play is as easy as a click. I found this player on a Google tips Web site just by typing in "embed mp3" on Google's main page. Anyone could have done it.

So why don't more classical music blogs take advantage of all the embeddable mp3 players out there? I think even bloggers, not just out-of-touch traditional newsies, need to learn more about the wide world of widgets.