I've had an interesting idea for music collaborations. There are some online storage services emerging that essentially give you a new hard drive (e.g. I: or I drive) that is actually saved to your account on the internet.

Hiya

Looks like elgg 1.0 is out....

(elgg 0.9 is the platform that the current Jammunity site is built on)

There seems to be a post on upgrading in the elgg forum:

http://classic.elgg.org/mod/vanillaforum/vanilla/comments.php?DiscussionID=2011

It seems to me that there are plusses and minusses to changing platforms (apparently 1.0 is hugely different):

One plus is that we'd be kinda future proofing with new features. Also, if we decide to switch late (ie. after we are fully up and running with members) we MAY lose all old posts. 

The minus is that the new platform probably does not support all the old plugins. So we would have to make do with all the basic features (which, in the first instance, seem pretty good) until new/upgraded plugins become available. Also, since its new, we dont know all the bugs that may be in there.....

Of course, another minus is the workload involved in the upgrade  

Any thoughts? 

Yo yo yo

Now, surely somebody can think up of a cooler name than 'general chat' for the ..er, general chat community. How bout:

The Mad Hatter's Party (or 'General Chat')   - maybe too nutty

or

The Gathering of Nomadic Whispers (or 'General Chat')   - maybe too mystical and serious sounding

It kinda sux with the "(or 'General Chat')" bit, but maybe it will make it easier for newbies to know whats happening... Other suggestions?

PS - General Chat's scope is exactly that, ranging from profound to ape-shit-insane to meaningless topics of discussion 

This site discusses the benefits of Drupal. Drupal's extensibility and more active developer community beats Elgg in some instances. However, drupal is a more generic CMS (content management system), and so is harder to customise to social networking needs yourself. However, DrupalEd is a freely available customisation of Drupal that "does blog, podcast, wiki, social bookmark, assignment, social networking, e-portfolio, and calendar right out of the box". And being open source and modular, you can add or remove modules you don't want (assignment in our case).

Worth considering. There may even be other social networking customisations out there. 

This post is to essentially invite everyone to discuss if there are any Elgg plugins that we would find useful. This previous post for some of the plugins and a link to all the others.

To get an idea of what Elgg is, and how it can be useful to you, there are a few links below:

• This is a podcast interview with the two founders of Elgg. It is a little date, and has an educational focus, but it is still a useful intro, and if you use a little imagination, you can see how their examples could be applied here. http://www.edtechtalk.com/EdTechTalk8
• Related to the previous link, there is a screen capture of someone going through Elgg and actually using it. It is a 70mb WMV video http://edtechtalk.com/video/elggtour.wmv
• The Elgg site itself has a good list of features which were the basis of the previous post http://elgg.org/features.php
• The Elgg site itself has a handy guide on 'Using Elgg' http://elgg.org/mod/mediawiki/wiki/index.php/Using_Elgg

As you may have noticed, this site is built on the 'Elgg' social networking platform. I have done quite a bit of research, and figured this was the best tool for the job (that's not to say I am right - please post other tools you find here too).

At the least, it seems to be able to do everything we need in a simple way, with more capability up its sleeve for the future. Below is a list of some useful features, 'inspired' shall we say for this link http://elgg.org/features.php :

• User profiles: Like any respectable social network, anyone can create a profile about themselves. This also acts as a personal home page, around which things relevant to you will be displayed. You can 'friend' other members to stay contact with what they are up to.
• Communities: This is a little diffeerent. Think of a community as a mutated user profile - it can do many of the same things, but is focussed on a particular interest. For example, I have created a 'Jamm Tools' to discuss tools that could be useful to jammers. This blog post is in the Jamm Tools community. You can become a member of other communities to stay in closer contact with happenings there.
• Blogging: All users and communities have a blog, where you can post the latest news, interesting ideas etc.
• Full RSS support: Obviously for blogs, but also for other features too. RSS gives you a link to info from the site. The difference is that you give that RSS link to an RSS reader (most modern browsers have one) and it will automatically go out and check if there is any new information. This saves you haveing to go to multiple sites to manually check for updates. It is also the basis of podcasting (see below).
• File repositories: All users and communities have a file repository, where you can upload any kind of files to share. This also has an RSS feed, so people can easily keep track of new files you upload. If these files are audio files, then this can become a podcast:
• Podcast Support: Is essentially a podcast or RSS feed with audio files in it. Give the RSS/podcast link to your 'podcatcher' software (like ipodder lemon), and it will automatically download any new audio that is posted to that feed. This should make it very useful for sharing jamm music. More of an introduction to podcasting in general here.
• Full Access Control: Literally every peice of information shared on the site can have its privacy set. This means you can restrict access to just yourself, to your friends, to your communities, to any registered user, or to anyone on the internet. This could be handy if working on a song with friends, but you are not ready to release it yet.
• Supports Tagging: This is great for discovering things you are interested in. Most descriptions and sets of keywords become 'tags' - they become links you can click on to find all the other resources on the site that also contain that keyword. This has many jamm applications - e.g. in a click, find any music, blog post or community related to 'guitar'.
• Customised Podcasts: As each audio file can be tagged, you can create a custom podcast feed of only audio that has certain tags. For example, get a podcast feed of 'drum' 'inspirational' 'riff' automatically delivered to you MP3 player. Another example is if you are collaborating on a song, tag all contributions with the song's name (or working title), e.g. 'the_peanut_butter_song', then get a podcast feed of any audio that others contribute to the song automatically delivered to you.
• RSS aggregator: You can pull togeather multiple RSS feeds into one custom feed. For example, if you are working on 4 different songs, aggregate those 4 different RSS feeds into a single feed to stay in touch with all of them through a single feed.
• OpenID: You create a single account, and once logged in, any other websites that support OpenID will automatically let you in - no need to be constantly typing in usernames and passwords. Most of the big players - MS, Yahoo, Google, Digg etc have pledged to support OpenID.
• Cross-site communities: This is pretty amazing - in theory, you can have all the users and communities on this site socialise and cross-communicate with the the users and communities of other elgg sites! So in theory, if we discaover a 'VJ' social network using elgg, we can collaborate as if we are all on one site.

Elgg also has many plugins, which can add more functionality, but these have to be added by an administrator (like me):

• Wikis: You can have Wikis within elgg communities.
• Forums: You can have Forums within elgg communities.
• Video Galleries: Elgg already has photo galleries. With this, you can also browse through galleries of videos.
• Rankings: Users can view and rank the popularity of uploaded content.
• Skype Status: In a user's profile, see their Skype status.
• Bookmarks - share bookmarks as resources like del.icio.us
• Many more - over 70 at http://elgg.org/mod/plugins/ 

Sounds like enough to keep us busy for a while!

This is an audio discussion at EdTechTalk, discussing many online collaboration and education tools, including:

• What is a web server
• How do you work with/on a server
• Server software
• Moodle (education platform)
• Elgg (social network platform)
• Blogging software
• What is RSS
• What is podcasting
• Skype and other VOIP tools

It has an education angle, but it more broadly useful. A little old now, but a nice, intro for people new to these ideas. http://www.edtechtalk.com/EdTechTalk7