During Tuesday's open mic night at Successful Blog I got into a brief discussion with Christine Kane about creativity, blogging and BIC (Butt-in-Chair). It made me think about something CHOM - a Montreal classic rock radio station - does, which is to play full album sides without interruption. When they do it, they say say something along the lines of, "The way it was meant to be played." This makes a lot of sense. "Back in the day" when the likes of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, etc. were making music we didn't have the technology to jump between songs like we do now, there was no digital downloads, you didn't even have "mixed tapes." And while I'm not a music expert in any way (people in the record industry feel free to jump in any time), I do know that bands in those days put a lot of thought into the sequence of songs. They were creating an entire experience for an album or per side, not just individual songs mashed together. I'm sure that still goes on today, but I would bet it's less important with the way singles are emphasized, and with digital technology allowing us to download whatever we want, and CD players that can skip around and listen to things out of order. In the good days of music, album sides were important. Thinking about this in terms of blogging, I can't help but think that most bloggers write what comes to them on any given day. Yes, they might have planned a few posts in advance, or more likely they've got a backlog of a few posts they can use when they have nothing else to day (which is a good thing), but how many of us plan out our posts in a bigger sense? "Theme posts" (for lack of a better term) are fairly common - I do it here with Monday Morning Musings - where you'll post on some theme/topic or in a certain style on a regular basis. Darren Rowse at problogger has his group writing projects, and Toby Bloomberg has Blogger Stories as two examples. But what I'm talking about is writing X number of posts in order, where the posts are designed to work together even if they're not on the same topic or in the same style or theme -- like an album side. Artists take us on a journey, maybe they start hard and fast, and then they move into a softer ballad, only to bring us back into a rock anthem at the end. It strikes me that few bloggers do this, but that it could be extremely effective and interesting for readers. And, it probably would have a positive impact on the community aspect of blogging - create an "album side" of blogging and you're taking people on a journey, you're not just tossing 'em one post at a time. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on the analogy, and how they might go ahead and creating "blogging album sides." (Related Tags: toby bloomberg, darren rowse, blogging, blogger stories, problogger, classic rock)