This is 29-year-old Carswell\u2019s second deejay gig for the week, with another planned back at Bates the following weekend. But despite his growing immersion in the music world \u2014 he now rents space at the club Element for a monthly dance party called \u201cPeople Don\u2019t Dance No More\u201d \u2014 Carswell, a technology specialist at the private Churchill School, is keeping his day job.<\/p>\n \u201cIt actually pays reasonably well, and nothing in the music business does,\u201d says Carswell, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Daphne Gomez-Mena \u201901, a rock singer and freelance video editor. \u201cIt also means I can have some balance in my life, between the work I do for Churchill and the work I do for fun for Music for Robots and deejaying.\u201d<\/p>\n Music For Robots emerged from a familiar post-college dynamic as the friends tried to keep in touch in the real world. As students, Willett and Connolly were in Strange Bedfellows together, while Connolly\u2019s and Carswell\u2019s social circles overlapped. The three became closer friends during senior year, and after graduation Connolly headed to Dartmouth to earn his master\u2019s in microbiology, while Willett worked at his hometown newspaper in Laconia, N.H. Carswell had just moved to New York City after having worked for Bates\u2019 media services department and deejaying on WRBC.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was back in the day when blogs were brand-new, before everyone and their cousin and their cat had one,\u201d says Connolly, who now teaches science at Saint Ann\u2019s in Brooklyn \u2014 he\u2019s the \u201cleader of the hipster crowd,\u201d according to a post at RateMyTeacher.com \u2014 whose wife,<\/p>\n Tamara, designed the Robots\u2019 Web site. \u201cWe each had our own little blogs, the common theme was music, and we thought it would be fun hopping back and forth between our different pages.\u201d<\/p>\n While they thought it might have a wider appeal, they had no idea whether anyone other than their friends would find their site among millions of emerging blogs on the Internet. (A blog is really just a Web site specializing in frequently updated personal content. The word is a portmanteau of \u201cWeb log.\u201d)<\/p>\n Going live on April 12, 2004, Music For Robots was one of the early MP3 blogs. \u201cWe started to write just for ourselves, but then people started reading us,\u201d says Carswell. \u201cWe\u2019d ask them to put a link to our page on their blogs, and we\u2019d link back to them. We went from dozens of hits a day to hundreds and now thousands.\u201d<\/p>\n Four years later, in a fluxive blogosphere where there are already 200 million ex-bloggers, the site has stamina. The blog features daily entries by Carswell and several other regular contributors \u2014 including Anders Pearson \u201901, Jon Cresswell \u201901,\u00a0and David\u00a0Brusie\u00a0’02 \u2014 whose eclectic musical tastes broaden the site\u2019s appeal. Connolly says he\u2019s into \u201cweird pop music\u201d from Japan and Korea, Pearson covers metal and industrial music, Willett\u2019s into pop and indie music, and Carswell\u2019s known for dance tracks.<\/p>\n Having the latest music attracts traffic from rock fans who want to keep on the cutting edge. The buzz increased early on when a major label, Warner Bros. Records, took the unusual step of encouraging various MP3 blogs, including MFR, to post free music from one of the label\u2019s bands. But that overture became a minidrama when Willett noticed that some oddly lavish praise for a Warner Bros. band had been posted on MFR, which he traced back to computers at Warner. \u201cI know we\u2019re dealing in relatively uncharted territory here,\u201d Willett told The New York Times<\/em> in 2004. \u201cBut I\u2019d expect a slightly different level of participation…. We\u2019re not an AOL chat room.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n When MTV aired a feature on the blog and its discovery of a Brooklyn band called the Hysterics \u2014 comprised of Connolly\u2019s students, in fact \u2014 the Times<\/em> again chimed in, noting that \u201cthis is how the Internet was supposed to help music.\u201d And around this time, Willett got noticed by Motormouth Media, a boutique PR firm specializing in cutting-edge music and pop culture accounts, and he\u2019s now on the West Coast working as a publicist for the outfit.<\/p>\n MFR also remains a must-read for record-label execs, The Boston Globe<\/em> noted recently, such as A&R man Sam Riback at Atlantic Records. \u201cOur readers have come to know who we are, based on our musical tastes, and they\u2019ve come to see that it\u2019s a brand they can trust,\u201d says Connolly. \u201cWe\u2019ve succeeded by taking what is essentially a labor of love and catapulting it into a revenue-generating model. Whether it\u2019s the music we write about or a compilation CD or advertising for a live performance, it\u2019s all the same formula \u2014 we share stuff that we really enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n New York-based journalist David McKay Wilson writes regularly for college magazines around the country. 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\nJ.P. Connolly ’00 (left) and Blaire Carswell ’00 (right) on Ludlow Street, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.<\/strong><\/p>\n