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Cobh really has become quite the tourist town. Today we—myself, Jessica, and my mother—took a boat over to Spike Island and enjoyed strolling around the fort and taking in the magnificent views. Then we went back across to town and had lunch where the White Star Line office used to be, sitting right next to the pier used to load goods and passengers for the Titanic.

We finished the evening in a pub listening to some great tunes (once the bodhrán player got the hint and left). Plenty of sunshine and plenty of pints. A really nice day.

Session.Org session SSWC'07 - a photoset on Flickr

This is simply marvelous! A meatspace gathering of musicians that know each other threw the Irish music website I run, The Session. I wish I could have been there.

Playlist J (part 2) – The Irish Mandolin – a website from Aidan Crossey

I had fun coming up five trad music tracks related to the letter J.

• Jenny’s Welcome To Charlie
• Jayne Pomplas
• Jig of Life
• Julia Delaney’s
• Jim Donoghue’s

Banjos and Discrete Technologies | stevebenford

An examination of how sites like The Session are meshing with older ideas of traditional Irish music:

There is a very interesting tension at play here – one that speaks directly to the design of new technologies. On the one hand, Irish musicians appear to be enthusiastically adopting digital media to establish a common repertoire of tunes, while on the other the actual performance of these tunes in a live session is governed by a strong etiquette that emphasizes the importance of playing by ear.

There’s an accompanying paper called Supporting Traditional Music-Making: Designing for Situated Discretion (PDF).

geoTrad - Google My Maps

Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:

The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland