I've just had an interesting blogging experience which I think throws an intriguing light on the subtleties of how specialist and generalist blogs interact with, compete with, and yet also help and feed into each other.

There's no doubt that my doubled-up specialist blogging obligations, here and here, have caused my other only semi- (blogging) obligations to suffer. I have written less for Samizdata of late than I would like to have. And have written hardly at all recently for Transport Blog or for Ubersportingpundit (even though I have automatic posting rights at those blogs also – I really must get back into the swing of posting at those, especially Ubersportingpundit, what with the Rugby World Cup, for which England are much fancied, fast approaching). So blogging here can definitely cause blogging elsewhere to suffer.

Sometimes, however, having a specialist blog outlet for something causes a piece to get written which might never have got done at all had there only been a big generalist group blog as an available outlet for it.

Over the last couple of days, I've written a big piece sparked off by me purchasing of a new digital radio. On the face of it, this piece was going to be pure self-indulgence: the boring details of Brian's domestic listerning habits, blah blah. Only the existence of Brian's Culture Blog, the entire purpose of which is for Brian to self-indulge, enabled this piece even to get started. Yet by the end of it, earlier today, I found that I had a really quite Good Essay under my fingers, and I thought, this could go on Samizdata. It's technological as well as musical. It throws a little light on all manner of commercial as well as artistic matters. There's a pop music angle, and there was even, at the end, an Internet angle, in the form of a sting in the tail of the tale about Downloading Music For Free Off The Internet, a subject of perpetual Samizdata fascination, because of the intellectual property debates we constantly have over there. So, to Samizdata the piece duly went.

Not only will the piece obviously get more readers there than here; I even reckon that there are people who will read it there, but who would not have read it here even if they'd come across it here. Why? Because a good reason to read anything is that others are reading it besides you. A piece about classical music etc. at Samizdata is a whole lot more significant than the identical piece about classical music etc. here.

So here was a case where my specialist blogging preoccupations actually helped me to write a piece for Samizdata.

I am now listening to BBC Radio Three on my digital radio, plugged into, as I explain at Samizdata, my regular CD playing kit. Fantastic.

And I'm listening to a wondrous performance of the Dvorak Piano Quintet, which is making more sense and more fun out of this piece than I've ever heard before. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. Sarah Chang and Ilya Gringolts (violins), Nobuko Imai (viola), Frans Helmerson (cello), Emanuel Ax (piano) – how's that for a line-up? Five players and five different record companies, according to my calculations. so good luck to anyone who tries to issue that as a CD in the next ten years.