Not What I Mean
Have you ever had the experience of beginning to say something – either vocalizing it or writing it – and finding as you go that what you’re actually saying is nothing like what you meant to say? I’m not just speaking of trouble articulating, but a shift in meaning. You start off with the intent to say x, but somehow the words don’t fit they way you want and you end up saying y instead. Then, as you continue your thoughts, you end up building on y until it becomes capital Y and x seems out of reach. And the really frustrating thing about this drift is that instead of going back and correcting your words to more closely match your thoughts, you often adjust your thinking to match your words.
I’m not necessarily saying this is wrong. There are plenty of people who think best in discussion, using the other person’s opinions and reactions as a way of sharpening their thoughts to a point. The thoughts produce words, and then the words prod the thoughts, back and forth, like two sides of a scale, until you have a balance. But I’ve experienced other times when I can almost see the thoughts skittering away, or throwing up their hands and saying, “Fine, I think what you say!”
Or am I alone in this?
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I’ve been thinking about google amalgamation. There’s something about the google empire that appeals to me, a vague sense of functionality, availability, and ingenuity. I use gmail, Picasa, google calendar, google video (now YouTube), google docs, and a whole lot more that I’m not thinking of right now.
The obsessive compulsive disorder part of me wants to go fully google, or at least as google as google has gone. This means switching (or switching back) to whatever google programs or services I used to use, like blogger. Actually, I’d like to do that because I don’t find WordPress very changeable. The other day I tried to add a widget for LibraryThing, but couldn’t find do it - not allowed. Now blogger, that’s a familiar beast, and it has the bonus allure of being associated with the mighty google empire.
Oh, so tempting.
One thing google doesn’t have but that I badly want them to work on is a google music player. Sure winamp or iTunes work okay, but I tend to think the brilliant search-ability of the google technology could be applied to music to great effect. There are music services out there, like LastFM, that compare aspects of a song, album, or artist, and suggest others of the same to the listener. I’m sure that one of the brains at google could do something similar. I’m thinking more like a inter-connectivity tree, and whenever a song is selected google could learn from that pick, educating the next song’s branches.
Of course, the music industry on-line is a bit tricky, what with the arguments and laws about file sharing. Google may want to keep clear of that mire for a long while so they aren’t instigated in any sort of massive illegal file sharing operation. And where do you draw the line, if you’re networking information on songs? Should the program suggest songs from the database it has learned, and then direct you to a site where you can purchase them? Or do like some pages and simply launch into the next song for free, like a radio station? (Actually, I don’t know if this still happens out there. It might have run into too many legal issues.)
In any case, it’s on my wish-list from google. They have all the other media for the computer – pictures and video. Why not music and sound?
