Last month, at the Joi Ito dinner in San Francisco, I made some sound recordings, which I intended to include with my blog post and photos of the event. But, listening to the recordings, I got into something I have wanted to do for a long time, which was present the audio of an event more as my telling of the event than as a documentary record.

So, my band (er, of one for now), The Ear Reverends created a little ditty based on some of the audio from that night, and it's called Joi vs The Burtonator. Please check it out and enjoy!

I started working on this right after the dinner (which was on November 11th), and wanted to release it in a timely fashion, so that it could be like a musical blog post. But, I was busy and couldn't quite get around to finishing it up.

Then, my next idea was to release it on my birthday, as my birthday gift to you (my friends). So, this is my birthday gift, but since I didn't quite get it out on my actual birthday, I decided to publish it today, which is the one month anniversary of the dinner.

Anyway, in general, I am interested in this idea of bloggers in some ways being like the medieval minstrels or troubadours who traveled from town to town singing of the events they witnessed (i.e., not as historians or journalists). Of course, with blogs, we post to a single place and our posts do some of the traveling for us.

So, this song, I hope, captures and re-tells some of the energy of the party that night, and the fun connections that were occuring. The voices in the song include especially Joi Ito, Kevin Burton, and danah boyd. (There is a little laugh that is either me, James aka imajes, or, very likely, both of us at the same time.)

Also, one overly self-referential thing I was thinking about is that bloggers, as a kind of sub-culture, will have some of their "own" music which, in one facet, may reference blogging and bloggers in a way that mostly only bloggers would understanding. So, this song might be something like that.

(Note and coincidentally: Joi Ito commissioned Shannon Campbell to write and sing Your Own Dot Org as birthday song for Ben and Mena Trott, which, released in October, may be the first recorded blogisong [? is mine a blong post ??, hm, does that mean it has blinging in it ??].)