I think I've finally found a use for daylogs--not an everyday use, but a use that makes sense in my shallow little life.
In the big picture of Everything2, daylogs are extremely useful for keeping a lot of ephemeral crap out of the real database (that should get some of you pointing your cursor at the downvote button!) and lightening the Editors' workload. But, because most of the ephemeral crap in my life isn't worth the trouble it takes to share, and I disdain the use of the daylog page as a vote-dump (more downvotes!), I seldom use daylogs except as a reference for soft-link commenting (OK, it's true--the whole TheBooBooKitty/(darsi) thing is really cute).
"Yet surely," I frequently muse, "there must be 1001 unheard-of, unholy uses for daylogs!" Maybe there are...here's one idea:
From now on, I plan to log every single CD I purchase.
Wait, Gods, wait! Don't nuke my account before you hear me out! I don't buy very many CDs--about 2 or 3 per month, and I have no intention of indexing the hundreds that I already own. Nor do I want to bore everyone with long-winded, highly subjective write-ups on every disc that passes through the player. What I have in mind is a method of keeping track of why the purchased CDs were purchased, with, perhaps, a one-line review to help in evaluating the reasons for buying each disc. In many cases, this will amount to comparing the subjects of an "Old Way/Net Way" dichotomy, with the intent of finding out if one method of discovering new (to me) music is more satisfactory than another. Note that recommendations from friends will probably not be a factor, since I don't have any friends.
As an example, yesterday I bought two CDs: Road Runner! The Best Of The Gants and Weezer (Weezer's debut album). Neither of these is recent music but, until recently, I had never heard either band.
The Gants, representing the "Old Way", were a no-hit band from Mississippi, active in the mid-sixties; I heard a 30-second clip of their music (and was subsequently unable to identify which song it was from) on an NPR radio station in the middle of Nevada during a recent vacation. I liked their sound--basic British Invasion-influenced American garage-pop, such as can be found on the Nuggets anthology--and made up my mind to learn more about them when I got home.
Weezer, of course, is well-known to many of you--their node on E2 is almost a GTKY-referendum for noders to express their views on grunge-pop nerd-empowerment--but, until I downloaded an MP3 of "Holiday" on a whim this week, I was completely unfamiliar with their work. "Holiday" grabbed me right away--sound aside, vacation nostalgia was on my mind--but I figured that it would be better to have a full CD to listen to rather than risk burning out on one song.
And the verdict? Was either random radio-exposure or downloadable web-exposure clearly a better enhancement of the music-consumption experience? In this case, no; the two purchases were about equally worthwhile. I probably wouldn't have bought a CD based on listening to a 30-second web clip, but I might have easily forgotten about that 30-second radio clip. Both discs were about what I expected. No other song on Weezer hit a personal-identification note, as "Holiday" did, but all of them are worth listening to more than once. Roadrunner! was a good mix of derivative originals and spirited cover-versions that I will play frequently until it fades into the vast shepherd's pie of my 60s rock'n'roll collection.
No thesis suggests itself; more studies are needed. Please bear with me.