A New CDM, A New Community

I’m happy today to introduce a new Create Digital Music, a new Create Digital Motion, and a new community called Noisepages.

The design this week represents a collaboration between Richard Bailey (aka musician proem), who designed and coded the site, graphic designer Nathanael Jeanneret, who conceived and designed the new layout and identity and graphics assets, and myself. We’ve built what I’m already finding a better platform for CDM’s stories, one I look forward to seeing every morning. Aside from how it looks, it’ll be a vastly more flexible and powerful platform for everything we do.

Just as importantly, I’d like to introduce Noisepages. CDM has always been driven by the community of people around it, and your ideas, advice, and creative work. A couple of years ago, we set out to build a community built on writing and creating, and not only social networking and chat. Built on BuddyPress and in beta today, Noisepages is:

• Groups: Gather with other interested folks and chat on forums, share events, and soon other information.
• Blogs: WordPress-based sites where you can chronicle your latest music, VJ reels, Ableton sets, Pd patches, circuit bends – whatever it is.
• Social features: Make intelligent connections with other people and stories, and consolidate information from other networks.

Because there are so many excellent specialized forums out there, we hope to make Noisepages a place where we can come together and share. The site will be free and ad-supported; we’re also working on pricing for features like additional storage and keeping ads off your site if you don’t want them.

Blog data is yours to freely import and export via WordPress, and we want to contribute back to the community the code we develop and the things we learn. That means being relevant to those of you already using your own self-hosted WordPress sites.

For their work on both these sites, special thanks to Jaymis Loveday, who helped conceive Noisepages, to Jaymis, Cal Wilson, and Matt Ganucheau for their development work, and to Wallace Winfrey for helping guide our server infrastructure.

Rollout and adjustment of both CDM and Noisepages will continue over the next few days, and there’s plenty more to say, including what we’re learning about HTML5 and BuddyPress and how Noisepages works. But for now, I’m excited to have the new site out in the world.

I look forward to what’s next.

Lastly, below, a video interpretation of how I hope the launch doesn’t go: