Student: Niamh Corkery(09004131)
Chosen blog: (Create Digital Music)
Chosen post: (Going Mobile:Nintendo DS-10 Comes to North America)

Essay:
Over the course of the last 3 weeks we were give the task to follow 3 Blogs that were of interest to me and in the final week i had to pick the one Blog i liked the most.
The three blogs I followed were;
1. www.createdigitalmusic.com
2. www.musictech.net
3. www.techcrunch.com
All of these Blogs were interesting to follow however I never really understood the word Blogs and the purpose for them therefore I had to pay particular attention to them and the comments of the public. At first this was hard to do and I began to lose interest however over the course of the three weeks there was one that stood out the most and that was the one that I chose to write about.
1.www.createdigitalmusic.com

Peter Kirn who is a composer/musician, media artist, and educator and technology journalist and is the creator of this Blog. Set up in 2005, the aim of this blog was to inform musicians of all the latest in Music and Games Technology.
While being displayed as a Blog, this is also seen as an online magazine, which was published the same year as when the Blog, 2005.
This magazine is only for sale in America
(“Creating Digital Music”)
The magazine helps people make the most of Digital Music on Apple Mac and Window’s.

This Blogs talks about the technical devices of the 21st Century e.g.; “Apple I-Phone”, “Software Synthesizers”, “Drum Machines”, “Camera’s” and the list goes on. This is of benefit to the modern musicians because it keeps them informed of new devices on the market and the opinions of professionals are also available!
This Blog is updated on a daily basis with almost 3 topics a day to talk about.
Most of the topics vary from day to day from talking about the “Visionsonic Festival Streaming Live” to “ Drum Machines have no soul”.

The target audience is clearly towards Musicians and those who have an interest in Music Technology, Digital Music and modern equipment.

This blog is also very likeable because the language contained within it is very much so simple apart from the few technical words that not all music people would understand e.g.; “hacks”, “mods”,”nano”.
Another likeable feature of this blog is the layout.

Each topic is firstly dated in red; they each contain a heading in bold writing and my favourite feature is that each topic will either contain pictures of the subject being discussed or else a youtube video is linked to the topic to watch. One video that I liked was “Kassen” this is a 2-minute clip on a Dj displaying some of his work through turntables and his idea to reverse one of the turntables to create a new sound, it is very interesting.
One of the main features with blogs is the interaction between the creator of the blog and his/her audience. This is created through comments to which the viewer follows the topics being displayed by the creator in this case Peter Kirn and they leave their views to Peter would does respond to his audience. Here is a sample of a typical conversation.

Comment by a viewer.

I agree that Instrumentalism, or even instrumentism, seems to get towards a distinction that’s useful; it has to do with identifying a particular mode of approaching a device. It doesn’t say anything about how that device works, directly. Maybe the value of ‘controllerism’, although I’m not very keen on the term, is to draw attention to those things that make a controller quite a different proposition than an ‘instrument’ in the traditional sense; with a controller you’re dealing with layers of abstraction that are absent with an Instrument (capital I). It’s arguable that this difference is significant enough to justify having a dedicated term for describing the kind of interaction that happens when you use devices like joysticks for music.

Peter’s response
Yes, it’s one of those cases in which I’m not fond of the term but also don’t have a good alternative. (Doh.) “Electronic music” isn’t a terribly descriptive term, either. “Live PA” always makes me imagine a big speaker, sitting alone onstage in a spotlight and people waiting for it to do something. I guess the question I have about controllerism is whether it’s possible to have live digital music without using some sort of controller to moderate what’s happening. Okay, we know it’s “possible” because we’ve seen people do the “push play” style of performance — but then, maybe there’s something more that we can say beyond people using controllers? And for that matter, I have some people use the laptop – yes, even the qwerty keyboard and trackpad – deftly and creatively. It’s a failure of terminology, but rather an interesting one, at least.

Niamh Corkery 1st Year MMPT (09004131)