LeonardCohenSearch

The concept underlying LeonardCohenSearch is primarily the organization of and navigation through material about Leonard Cohen that is archived online. Given that this is a spare time project for me, even those modest aspirations are stretch goals.

Yet, as we have all read on bumper stickers, “Stuff Happens.” And, some of that stuff is connected with Leonard Cohen. So, in hopes of making current Cohen-pertinent news items pragmatically accessible, I’ve added a page of automated news trackers such as the following:

This example searches news feeds for current material about certain current issues associated with Leonard Cohen:

1. “new album” AND “Leonard Cohen” – The new Cohen Live In London album anticipated later this month
2. Tour  AND “Leonard Cohen” – The continuing 2008-2009 Leonard Cohen World Tour
3. Austin AND “Leonard Cohen” - The first concert on the official North American leg of the Tour
4. Watchmen AND Hallelujah – The debate over the used of Cohen’s Hallelujah in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen
5. Ticketmaster AND “Leonard Cohen” – The highly criticized role Ticketmaster plays in boosting the prices for the Cohen tickets

Another news tracker pullss items about individuals, such as Sharon Robinson, Anjani, and Bob Dylan, who are associated with Cohen.

Obviously, this is an experiment that will  be in a state of flux for some time. Still, it may prove worth checking if the topics pique your curiousity.

The page of news items trackers can be found at Leonard Cohen News

The List of Covers of Leonard Cohen Songs designated by the LeonardCohenSearch Web Directory is A Thousand Covers Deep at LeonardCohenFiles.  It is, to my knowledge, the most complete and updated catalog available.

• A Thousand Covers Deep Listed By Artist (LeonardCohenFiles)
• A Thousand Covers Deep Listed By Title (LeonardCohenFiles)

Consequently it is especially useful to satisfy ones curiosity, to settle arguments, to win bar bets, and to  compose posts such as those generated during the Hallelujah Hootenanny Britain recently hosted. For example, in  Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – The Fun Facts, I wrote

This morning,  A Thousand Covers Deep,  the database of covers of Leonard Cohen songs at LeonardCohenFiles.com, contained 181 versions of Hallelujah. For the record, Suzanne is still (barely) the most covered Leonard Cohen song, with 185 versions listed at  A Thousand Covers Deep.

On these occasions, one needs  the exact number of covers of a given Cohen song.  This can be a problematic task because the list of covers is not numbered and some of the songs have well over 100 covers, making counting by hand cumbersome. Counting covers by hand is also likely to induce errors and, in any case, is annoying. There is, however, a relatively simple means of calculating this number:

1. Open Excel or any spreadsheet. If no spreadsheet is available, open a text editor such as Microsoft Word.
2. Copy the group of covers to be counted, taking care to include all of the covers but not copying extra lines.
3. Paste this into the upper left margin of the spreadsheet.

Each cover should automatically be placed into one row of the spreadsheet. The row numbers on the left indicate the number of covers. If Microsoft Word is used instead of a spreadsheet, take care to paste the contents such that the first cover is on the first line of the Word document. Go to Preferences-Properties. In the box that opens, click the “statistics” tab. The number of lines listed will be the same as the number of covers.

Like A Tweet On A Wire

While I was composing a recent post on my Heck Of A Guy blog, Blagojevitter Broadcasts Blagojevich Brouhaha, I realized that the the technology described might be useful in other situations, including some relevant to those of us with an interest in  Leonard Cohen.

The inelegantly named  Blagojevitter monitors Tweets, those brief, seemingly ubiquitous messages sent via Twitter,¹ for references to the Illinois scandal du jour, Governor Blagojevich’s alleged (chortle) attempt to gain some personal financial advantage by brokering the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama.
Not being a Twitterer I read up on that  process and, persuaded of its potential utility,  set up a page monitoring Tweets for Leonard Cohen references at Like A Tweet On A Wire.  At present, there are 2 monitors, one for “Leonard   Cohen” and one for “Hallelujah cover.”

Why Twitter?

1. It’s fun and occasionally instructive to eavesdrop. Reading the random conversations and comments  made about Leonard Cohen via Tweets offers insights,²  more than a few laughs, and the occasional provocative phrase.  When, for instance, I set up the monitors, the first message that popped up – and I am not making this up – had to do with a young woman’s celebratory comment re her completion of  the work day, leaving  her free to explain the effect Leonard Cohen has on her panties. Less provocatively but more commonly one finds serious  and boisterous arguments about the best version of Hallelujah, lots of women of all ages expressing romantic passions aroused by Leonard Cohen, and testimonies about “my favorite Leonard Cohen song.”

2. Twitter is a useful means of communication  via portable devices at specific  events as diverse as earthquakes (people from Francisco reported on earthquakes that took traditional news sources hours to confirm) and  band festivals. Consider the experience described  It started with a tweet – my Twitter epiphany:

That all changed last week when Twitter played a major role in shaping my experience of SXSW. It started in Chicago airport when, waiting for a connecting flight, I exchanged Twitter handles with a bunch of fellow geeks, also on their way to Austin. Suddenly I was part of a mini community with a shared purpose and the tweets coming through felt super relevant and interesting (‘X is talking in Room 8 right now and she’s awesome’ ‘I’m grabbing some lunch at the Halcyon – anyone want to join me?’).

Where previously I thought of Twitter as being like SMS or IM but more spammy, I started to see the benefits of its one-to-many format. It was possible to throw a thought out there, with people able to respond or not, without obligation – something which definitely isn’t true of SMS or IM, where an unreplied to message usually goes down like a cup of cold sick. The beauty of apps such as Twitterific is that your friends’ twittering becomes an almost ambient side-channel with you free to dip in a out as your time and interest allows.

Another interesting use of Twitter at SXSW was as a back-channel during the sessions, enabling attendees both within and without of a session to have a near real-time conversation about it (with well documented consequences in the case of the Zuckerberg keynote). Of course, the smarter session chairs pulled the back-channel up on screen so they could gauge the mood of the audience and respond accordingly.

SXSW, in fact, nearly overwhelmed  Twitter as participants immediately understood all that network could provide: breaking news from conference sessions was availabe as it broke, blogs were updated mutiple times in a short period, gatherings, dinners, and parties were organized by paricipants, not an administrator.

Similarly, groups connected by common interests instead of a common experience benefit from the ongoing exchanges on Twitter. This is most evident among the technogeeks who inform each other about new gizmos, tools, and toys in a flash – or, more accurately, in a tweet.

Businessmen can trade travel updates, pass along messages if one is running late, catch changes in pricing from the home office as they happen, …

And, it beats phone calls , e-mail, and IM bcause being online is not a necessity for Twitterers.   Twitter is a distributed communication system, which menas a tweet from your cell plhone can be followed on another cell phone, the web, IM, or any portable device one can imagine.

3. Twitter is an effective way to quickly submit and distribute  information, such as directing others to posts one has written, to news or entertainment feeds, or to alert others than something of interest is taking place on a web site, a TV channel, a radio station, …
It’s an experiment. We’ll see what happens.

1. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, this description from Wikipedi may be useful:

   Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Tweetie, TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook.

   [↩]

2. News organizations have become aware of  Twitter as a source of story ideas, as is the case in the Blagojevich case.  According to Mallary Jean Tenore, writing at Newsies Twittering on Twitter,

   The Orlando Sentinel, for instance, most recently used Twitter to post updates on the Atlantis and Endeavour shuttle launches this summer. The New York Times, meanwhile, updates its Twitter account at least a couple times an hour, posting Times headlines with links to related articles. Representatives of both news organizations said using Twitter is one way of connecting to users who may not otherwise read a newspaper or visit a news organization’s Web site. … By clicking on Twitter’s public timeline — a random listing of Twitterers that is updated every four minutes — you can click on a profile and see what it looks like. Here is Poynter’s Twitter page, which I recently created.

   [↩]

Trick of Treating At The Tower Of Song

In the Parallel Leonard Cohen Universe

Unlike those other persnickety Leonard Cohen-dedicated  web sites that limit themselves to facts, Heck Of A Guy is willing to not only document but create history.  Today’s Halloween post features The Lost Leonard Cohen Album – Songs Of Love And Halloween.  Try finding that information elsewhere.

OK, this is admittedly a self-indulgent, “guess what I learned in school today” kind of post. Deal with it.

If one checks out the right sidebar on this page (as well as every other page on this site), one will find links to the 5 most recent posts from Speaking Cohen and Leonard Cohen Halls Of Fame.

Now, those went online about three weeks ago so they hardly qualify as news. And, since they required little more than plugging in the RSS feed into a handy widget that inserts into the sidebar, there was little technological expertise required.

Only this morning, however, did I figure out how to devise a RSS feed that would reference posts from a specific category rather than an entire blog or web site.

That is important, at least in this case, because my primary place of blogness, Heck Of A Guy, houses a substantial amount of material about Cohen (and another chunk of text about Anjani) – along with, most recently, posts about wild turkeys on my back lawn, my proposed designs for the new McHenry County (IL) Seal (featuring Dick Tracy), and the Leningrad Cowboys and Red Army Choir Covering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.

As it turns out, not every reader who relishes a nuanced exposition on Leonard Cohen’s use of dance metaphors before and after his retreat to the Zen monastery is equally excited about the prospect of reading, for example, that entry elaborating on my mother’s collection of straight razors.

I know – at first, I couldn’t believe it either.

My new-found knowledge allows me to isolate the Leonard Cohen posts from the other Heck Of A Guy entries, thus protecting the sensitive purist from contact with the non-Cohen info. Consequently, as of this morning, the five latest posts from the Heck of a Guy “Leonard Cohen” category are also displayed on that right sidebar.

Pretty slick, eh?

Why Are Posts From Only Those 3 Leonard Cohen Sites Displayed?

Do I detect cynical suspicion that there is some kind of payoff in return for these placements – perhaps a sack of small, unmarked bills or promises of sexual favors or offers of a fresh pressing of the rumored 1984 Cohen Christmas LP?

Alas, it’s all quid and no quo – although I am exquisitely vulnerable to bribery, those links were chosen solely because they originate from Cohen-focused sites of the first rank – and they also offer an RSS feed (or its equivalent). As far as I can determine, the other sites listed here and used in the specialized search engine don’t provide a feed (or don’t make it evident enough for me to find).

The message is that while LeonardCohenSearch is as ecumenical as they come, in addition to quality content, we need the feed.

Because of the illness of a loved one, routine updating of this web site has become impossible. My hope is to return to building the content of this site and improving its operation when the current tempests are quelled.

Given the dearth of recent additions and modifications to LeonardCohenSearch, this is, I suppose, a clarification rather than a notification.

A convergence of family and business responsibilities make routine updating of this site and my other personal and professional blogs impossible.

Happily, the major feature of LeonardCohenSearch is the specialized search engine which requires relatively minor tweaking and occasional maintenance.

My backlog of potential additions to the Index: Selected References section, however, will, for the most part, remain backlog for now.

The most likely scenario for the immediate future has me sporadically and unpredictably posting items when the opportunity arises.

My hope is to return to my original schedule when the current tempests are quelled.

After writing yesterday’s post, Leonard Cohen Search and The Goldilocks Conundrum, it became obvious that the Leonard Cohen Nicknames Page is a poor fit for this site. It will be moved to the Leonard Cohen category at my Heck Of A Guy blog.

I also plan to eliminate “Original Content” section here on the LeonardCohenSearch site.

Once moved, the Leonard Cohen Nicknames page can be accessed at

Strategic Choices For Leonard Cohen Search

Given that the future is, as noted above, potentially problematic, I’ve been working on ongoing strategies for LeonardCohenSearch.

I constructed this site as a means of efficiently finding accurate and useful information about topics related to Leonard Cohen. While previous occupational experiences have caused me to develop a serious antipathy toward the term so ingrained that it may quality as an intellectual autoimmune disorder, I admit that the preceding sentence approximates a mission statement,¹ and as such, it has implications for the management of this venture.

I’ve labeled this post “Leonard Cohen Search and The Goldilocks Conundrum” because one quickly realizes that the primary issue for LeonardCohenSearch.com is avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of doing too much, which would make the site cumbersome, and doing too little, which would make it impossible to find some information that is available. The goal is, in fact, to create a process that is “just right.”

This was, of course, the tactic at the heart of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story – an account which becomes much easier to comprehend once one grasps that Goldilocks was obviously a consultant and the bears were her clients. And the fairy tale itself? It was actually the PowerPoint presentation The Goldilocks Group, LLC made to 3Bears, Inc to explicate The Value Locus Decision Matrix.

A Few Answers and Many More Questions

The questions are easier to derive. I’ve listed the two most acute issues as examples:

1. How many categories of interest should be listed at Index: Selected References? A few categories are of such wide interest (e.g., the discography) that they are no-brainers. There is, however, the potential for literally hundreds of such areas of interest. Listing too many, an especially tempting risk for me, could make reviewing the links cumbersome and inefficient. It could, in fact, overwhelm visitors, discouraging them from even trying.
2. Should there be any other material other than the custom search engine and the essential categories at Index: Selected References, and, if so, what? My concern is that any material that is not in the reference mode could be distracting or confusing to users. Currently, for example, I have links in the sidebars to accounts of Leonard Cohen’s Induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and his 2008 Tour schedule, information that can be found easily enough on several sites. On the other hand, Leonard Cohen’s impending tour and his recent entry into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame would be of interest to many who have only recently discovered Leonard Cohen and might not know where to find such information. This site even has one page of original content, Leonard Cohen, AKA – The Nicknames, which I’ve rationalized as a potentially useful list not found, as far as I know, elsewhere. It would, however, be a simple matter to move it to the Leonard Cohen section of my own blog while maintaining a link here.

I do have, I think, a few answers that have evolved into tentative principles for LeonardCohenSearch.com. For example,

1. The custom search engine requires ongoing tweaking based on user experience. Web sites dealing with Leonard Cohen, like all other sites, come and go, evolve in different ways, deteriorate, improve, … . The only response can be ongoing monitoring and adjustments, followed by more monitoring and further adjustments, ad infinitum. At this stage, my own interpretations and assessments may be sufficient. If this site demonstrates any long term utility however, a more systematic and objective methodology will be necessary. Search technology is also progressing, another process that requires monitoring in order to take advantage of new capabilities. Currently, technology is available to customize the custom search engine according to various parameters. Users who are introducing themselves to Cohen’s work may be better served by a subsection of sites offering fundamental information while other users who have accumulated a personal database about Cohen’s life and music may wish to focus on sites offering more esoteric or more subjective information. The “Anjani” focus link is the first of these refinements.
2. References at Index: Selected References (and References In FAQ Format, which consists of the same content in a different format) will be adhere to the principle of Occam’s Linkage:² A given category will be linked to as few references as possible to provide all necessary or useful information, eliminating links to other sites that add nothing. If, for example, all of the title and information pertinent to Leonard Cohen’s discography is accessible at one site, only a link to that site will be provided.

Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. I don’t have the answers to all the questions,³ but I thought it could be useful to let the site users know what’s going on.

Stay tuned.

1. I did learn much from the many Mission Development meetings I attended. I offer this example as a bonus to today’s post: If your articulated Mission makes as much sense read backwards as it does read forward (e.g., “Excellence Through Quality” and “Quality Through Excellence”), then you have got yourself a dandy Mission Statement but, my friend, you certainly do not have a mission – if you know what I mean. [↩]
2. Occam’s Razor is defined at Wikipedia as The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (“law of parsimony” or “law of succinctness”): “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” This is often paraphrased as “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam’s razor is usually understood. [↩]
3. This is why they call it a “conundrum. [↩]

I had inadvertently omitted Speaking Cohen from the list of Primary Cohen Sites. That faux pas was rectified this morning with apologies to Marie, the webmaster.