Just finished a zingy little article in the latest edition of the Utne Reader entitled, What Your Favorite Album Says About You (by Christian Finnegan, from the Summer 2003 issue of Jest). It begins…

It is said that one should never judge a book by its cover. That seems like sound logic, but what about album covers? A Celine Dion album, for instance, that someone tells you is there favorite? I think it’s safe to say that you have every right to judge that album and, moreover, the person who enjoys it.

John Coltrane — A Love Supreme: I tell anyone who’ll listen what an avid jazz fan I am. But the truth is, if not for that Ken Burns documentary, I wouldn’t know John Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard’s Roscoe P. Coltrane.

Pretty funny … I love Coltrane, and I love that album … granted, it isn’t my favorite album of his (although, it is probably his best). But after reading that, I almost feel like I have something to prove… Hey! I listen to that album … well, not that much… but actually, I did listen to “Pursuance” today… but it was just randomly playing… er, jazz… music… today…

So I did what any self-absorbed geek would do … I created a script to display my current play list on my web site.

Actually, I had a couple of other motivations for doing this… I’ve been to a number of blogs that displayed what they were currently listening to, and I realized that here was the quickest way that I could judge that person and their writing.

Another motivation is to setup a personal experiment. Would the fact that anyone in the world have a window into what I’m listening to influence my choice in what I play? Granted, I could (and would) claim that I’m listening to Abba because my two year old is sitting on my lap… I know, I know … who really comes to my home page? Still, I think this will be a great experiment to see just what kind of a poseur I really am.

But I guess my real motivation was that it might be fun to write.

Sure, I looked around and downloaded Kung-Tunes and I highly recommend it for everyone else… but for me, I wanted something that would run without me starting it, and I really didn’t want yet-another-dock-icon. And instead of a simple “list” I wanted something chatty … you know, as if I was just continually typing it myself. (Note: I just ran across nowPlaying, and while I liked the look of the graphics it produce, I wanted something in a text-mode).

So, I whipped up a little script to have my Mac run regularly to upload a file containing my current playlist up to my web server. I don’t have to think about it. And I like that. However, it is pretty complicated to install…

Would you like it? You would? I don’t know. Tell you what, if you are handy with perl, download my StoreiTunesInfo and have fun with it. However, if you aren’t a geek, then try Kung-Tunes as it really is pretty easy to use and should do what you need it to.

I guess I better start playing some Bach now that the whole world is watching…