When on 1 January 2010 I decided to finally give Twitter a chance, I wanted to give it a fair shot, and that meant actually contributing instead of just lurking (like I had done earlier on Facebook, and which had not ended well).
I knew, however, that I was simply not going to succeed if I tried to use Twitter in the conventional way. All those what-am-I-doing-right-now updates of the "I just made myself a yummy peanut butter sandwich" variety in aggregation give Twitter its unique and quite pleasant "I'm kinda staying in touch with people I like but don't actually interact with much if at all" feel, so I am not knocking them [*], but all the same they're just never going to be something I'd be comfortable sending out. Or at least not without something else a little bit more substantial to compensate.
([*] This is contrast to tweets that complain or express frustration about something, or that are about public transportation. I particularly dislike tweets that complain about public transportation. Gods, I know it sucks when the train is late. I sympathise, I really do. I just don't need to read about it again and again and again. I also realise that what I'm doing right here in this very paragraph is, in fact, complaining about something, and for much longer than 140 characters at that. But at least it's not about the bloody trains. Or the snow. Or trains being delayed by snow.)
And so I hit upon the idea of the Weeksongs. I've always been evangelical about the music I like, and telling people what my favourite song of the week was would both fit that evangelical streak as well as be a kind of what-am-I-doing-right-now update/go-see-this-nifty-thing forward in the actual spirit of common Twitter usage. After a while I did realise I simply did not have a favourite new song every week, so I expanded into also posting old, but perhaps lesser-known classics from my music archives.
Having done the Weeksongs for one year now, I can say that as far as I'm concerned the experiment is a big success. I would love to get perhaps a bit more feedback on the songs, but the responses I do get tend to be positive, which is great. And the logs tell me each song gets downloaded a couple of dozen times (not counting the bots and slurpers), so I think people are listening to them.
More selfishly, though, I consider the Weeksongs a success because I am benefiting from them in various ways. They have indeed helped to keep me interested in and active on Twitter. More unexpectedly, they've also made me much more conscious and aware of the kind of music I like, and that's a side effect I found very interesting. (I had not fully realised the extent to which I've almost completely moved away from hard rock towards disco/pop this past decade -- but the weeksongs kind of made that very obvious to see.) And now, at the end of the year, I have a killer playlist to use as a permanent reminder/summary/sampling of what I was listening to in 2010.
There were 52 weeks in 2010, but in the end I posted only 45 weeksongs. I missed the first week of 2010 because I had not had the idea yet; I missed two weeks in May when I had a severe disk crash and could not access my music for a time; and I missed another three weeks when I was in South America in August without much Internet access at all. The final missing week was caused by me moving the weeksongs from Fridays to Sundays.
Of the 45 weeksongs, 32 were songs I had not known before 2010, and 16 (i.e. half) of those were actually released in 2010.
Here is the final list (the 'N' denotes a new-to-me-in-2010 song):
01-01 [miss] N 08-01 cocktail slippers - you do run N 15-01 eli paperboy reed - ace of spades N 22-01 glen campbell - wichita lineman N 29-01 ward brothers - cross that bridge N 05-02 róisín murphy - overpowered N 12-02 steely dan - any world N 19-02 mylene farmer - que mon coeur lache N 26-02 asia - never again N 05-03 zoot woman - memory N 12-03 the decemberists - 16 military wives N 19-03 the madd - war or hands of time N 26-03 crosby, stills, nash & young - everybody i love you 02-04 kristen hersh & michael stipe - your ghost 09-04 the contrast - caught in a trap 16-04 o.v. wright - nickel and a nail N 23-04 edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros - 40 day dream N 01-05 bluejuice - broken leg 07-05 jasper steverlinck - life on mars N 14-05 the new pornographers - crash years 21-05 [miss] 27-05 [miss] 05-06 heaven 17 - temptation N 11-06 voices in your head - magic N 19-06 robyn - the girl and the robot 27-06 meat loaf - you took the words right out of my mouth (hot summer night) 04-07 tambourine - high under the moon N 09-07 big boi (feat. andre 3000 and sleepy brown) - lookin for ya 16-07 fictionplane - two sisters N 23-07 jurk - zou zo graag N 31-07 kylie minogue - aphrodite 06-08 zebra - tell me what you want N 14-08 the coral - 1000 years 22-08 the brand new heavies - sometimes 27-08 [miss] 03-09 [miss] 10-09 [miss] N 17-09 justin currie - the fight to be human N 26-09 aeroplane - superstar 01-10 ghosts - mind games N 08-10 jamiroquai - white knuckle ride N 16-10 manic street preachers - (it's not war) just the end of love N 22-10 black sabbath - neon knights N 29-10 voicst - feel like a rocket 12-11 fischer-z - the worker N 21-11 seu jorge - carolina N 28-11 gotye - learnalilgivinanlovin 05-12 beck - girl N 12-12 john grant - chicken bones N 19-12 miss li - dancing the whole way home N 26-12 edwyn collins - losing sleep
For 2011, I am hoping to get to 52 weeksongs without any gaps. It's a modest goal, to be sure. But I'll really enjoy myself trying to fulfill it, and that's not something you can say for too many other new year's resolutions.