If you work in online media, you have to spend a distressing amount of time worrying about "search engine optimisation". Or, as it's more properly described, "gaming Google." That is, describing something in such a way that it ranks very highly in any Google search for a relevant term.

So, how does this apply to band names? Because I've just searched my iTunes library for "The The". And it didn't find anything, even though I've got all Matt Johnson's albums in the library. Presumably because iTunes ignores "the". The same problem occurs when searching for "The The" in Google. The mighty G just ignores the definite article.

Oops. Suddenly, Mr Johnson is expunged from reality (which is really what we mean when we say "not found in Google"). So which other band names are particularly ill-suited to the Googleverse? The Band? CSS (stands for "Cascading Style Sheets" in geekville)? Any others?

I don't know to what extent Twitter has taken root amongst the Word massive yet, but if you haven't checked it out take a look at Stephen Fry's posts from his voyages around Africa. Wonderful indeed.

Tricky said this in an interview:

No other country could have produced the Specials

Terry Hall grew up with Jamaican culture as well as English culture, that’s the only way The Specials could have happened. It couldn’t have been Jamaican music on one side, and English music on the other, then you’d just have had reggae and punk rock. They bled into each other. In America I know guys who’ve got Jamaican parents and they can’t understand a Jamaican guy talking, but Terry Hall can, and his parents are white. No other place on earth could have produced the Specials, unless a whole group of white English people did a mass migration to Jamaica, and they mixed. If you listen to American ska bands, they don’t sound authentic, it's like surf music with reggae mixed with it.

I think he's got a point. Do we agree? Full interview's here (and his views on violence are fascinating and illuminating).

I set up a new playlist in iTunes the other night, configured to include songs which I hadn't listened to before (or rather, songs I hadn't listened to all the way through - iTunes only increases the Play counter at the end of the song, as far as I can work out).

I was shocked. There were over 2,300 songs in the list, which is about 15 per cent of my library. A lot of it was very familiar stuff I'd ripped from old CDs and never listened to again, but still. 2,300 songs!

Add to that the landslide of other digital material - YouTube videos, interesting articles in the New Yorker, RSS feeds pouring in every morning, all of it good stuff, all of it needing to be consumed - and you start to wonder: how am I ever going to get round to all this stuff?

So, some questions: where do you listen to music these days? Amidst this cornucopia of abundance, have you found yourself needing to deliberately organise yourself to listen? Has this changed your attitude to music (is it, for instance, more commoditised)? And as your MP3 collection expands to fill hard drives with more capacity than Alan Turing could have dreamed about, are you beginning to find it all rather oppressive?

Big up and big thanks to Speechification for the archiving of Pete Paphides' glorious programme on the "lost" Duran Duran album Dark Circles. Bullet point reasons:

• Stephen Duffy is a candidate for anyone's list of Greatest Living Englishmen
• Nick Rhodes is not, as it turns out, a brain-dead dandy, but a witty bloke with a very Brummie line in self-deprecation
• The stuff from Dave Unsworth of a rival Brummie band, who says Duran Duran had money thrown at them, were offered the world and a career being worshipped by legions of young women, but "you can't blame them, they were only 18." Ah, the vigorous self-righteousness of the failed pop musician
• A reminder to me that the best English music comes from insufferably pretentious teenagers whose ambitions are completely out of whack with their musical ability. If you get a sufficient number of these insufferably pretentious teenagers and stir them up, you end up with Joy Division. This is important to remember when you're a father whose son is organising a gig for his band despite the fact that they can only play half of Teenage Kicks.

Thanks, Speechification lads.

Uklear war has been declared, thanks to the new official best website in the world. It takes the songs from your last.fm profile and gives you the tabs to play them on the uke. God Is In The House by Nick Cave has just been bouncing round our house. The kids have fled.

Following from the Ross-Brand-Walliams debacle at the Roundhouse, is this another sign that a: the allure of celebrity is dimming and/or b: it was never there in the first place, and when people have to pay real money they vote with their feet:

The weekend's worst punchline, however, is reserved for Paris Hilton's The Hottie & the Nottie (Regent Releasing). The final count will show that the critically reviled comedy featuring the seemingly talentless Hilton has sold a meager $25,500 in tickets at 111 locations over the weekend. That's only $230 per screen for theaters that were convinced to book this disaster. That means that, based on an $8 average ticket price, 29 paying customers showed up at each location over the 3-day. In a country that seems fascinated with Paris Hilton, only 3,219 unlucky Americans will have been suckered into seeing Hottie by Monday morning.

See, I thought it was just me. Having read Merlin Mann's discourse on using smart playlists and stuff to organise your iTunes and iPod listening, I've realised that when it comes to being anal about iTunes, I am a complete amateur. Merlin describes how he has a playlist for "only music", a playlist for "unlistened and unrated" and a playlist for "old favourites I might not otherwise listen to."

Actually, I think my solutions are rather more elegant. I too have an "unlistened and unrated" playlist, but to avoid feeling barraged by a wave of music I haven't listened to yet, including noise-metal oddities from free music magazine CDs, I intersperse the playlist with the odd highly-rated number so I have some old familiar staging posts in my journey through the frequently strange and bizarre.

And I rate everything I listen to. This drives my family slightly bats, because whenever I arrive somewhere after a session with my iPod (driving my son to school, a jog in the park, a walk from the station) I always stand in the kitchen quickly adding ratings to the songs I've listened to (sometimes, whisper it, I do this in the car when I'm driving, but won't be anymore after a particularly nightmarish BBC documentary this week in which a lorry driver slaughtered a woman in a car because he was fiddling with his mobile).

My ratings strategy, at least this week's ratings strategy (it changes a lot) is simply:

5 stars: essential and core to the culture

4 stars: great and always listenable

3 stars: OK, but doesn't make me tingle

2 stars: poor, but worth keeping for other reasons (completeness, for example - I'd never delete a track off the White Album, but Honey Pie's come close a few times)

1 star: marked for deletion on the next purge. Hip hop filler tracks feature strongly, as does the Stiff Records Box Set. Man there's some crap on there.

Anyway, I feel like I've come out, now, as an Anal iTunes User. Now, does anyone else out there masturbate?

My son, bless him, bought me a CD for my birthday this morning. An Eagles CD. The new Eagles CD, dismissed contemptuously by Mr Hepworth in this month's mag. I don't think I ever want to listen to it, despite loving their earlier stuff (as he does). Oh dear, what am I to do?

Found a link to this in Popbitch: http://www.schlagerparty.co.uk/

From the site blurb:

Schlager music in modern terms is the genre of music that is best described as ‘Abba-esque'. Coming from the German word for "hitter" or a music "hit", it describes modern traditional pop music, predominantly from Scandinavia. Most schlager fans will point towards the Swedish Eurovision Song Contest selection show, ‘Melodifestivalen', as the annual source of the best schlager music but many songs in the running to represent Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and recently Estonia and Latvia are included.

I had never, ever heard of this before.