an interesting article on taste tribes(via scrubbles). the way people often interact with other people not because of who they are but because of what they like.

it's a nice article, but when i think of most of the people i know in taiwan, i wouldn't say i was friends with them because we like the same things. though i know in the past i would often become friends with people because we liked the same things(usually music), but overtime our tastes might diverge yet that wouldn't change our friendship.

the problem with taste tribes(or on line communities) is often they are too narrow for me. three of the mailing lists i'm on are the exoticalist, the pizzicato five mailing list, and cloud-zero(legendary pink dots mailing list). if the pizzicato five mailing list was to limit itself purely to talking about p-5 i'd be horribly bored, but as it is, posts often go off on weird tangents to thai pop music, brasillian music, etc. though recently what is discussed on that list i find less and less interesting. the cloud-zero list tends to be limited in discussion to lpd related material, and bands in a similiar vein(current 93, nww, etc.). but rarely does it go off into larger discussions in music. sometimes i think the people on that list have a rather narrow view of music, but that may just be a surface appearance. the exoticalist is by far the most wide ranging list. i know that at one time there was a very narrow subject matter discussed there. but these days everything from les baxter and martin denny to throbbing gristle and german new wave music will get discussed. the connection between these are not so far apart, yet it's interesting how throbbing gristle may come up on cloud-zero, but martin denny would not. but on exotica these tangents happen quite a bit. but maybe that is because a large number of people on the list came to exotica/spaceage pop through listening to a lot of post punk bands, whereas people on cloud-zero may still only be listening to those post-punk bands and their followers.

but to come back to the article, it also brought up blogs, and why do we link back to other blogs? i tend to link to blogs i read. but i also link back to sites where i found certain pages or links(ie the link to scrubbles above). it seems only right to let people know who clued you onto some site. i know there are blogs out there that don't have a list of blogs they read, nor tell you who clued them into certain pages they link to. sometimes i find blogs with no links like that to be lacking something, or it feels like they don't want to have anything take away from them. well, a blog is after all rather self-indulgent in itself, but i like the idea of being able to discover new blogs via the place someone has found certain links. a blog that doesn't reveal where they discovered things often feel like a dead end.