4th Part: Search and community tips.

Like I said in the 2nd Part of this "Panal tutorial", in the header of the site there are 5 permanent labels that take you to the different pages of it: Home, My account, Upload, Search and Community.
I've explained how the upload works, that is the most difficult part to understand. I think that My Account, Search and Community will be easier to write about, because a lot of sites have similar workspaces.

My account. This is where you'll configure all the info that you want to show to the community: name, email, country, language, blog/web page and some other stuff that could be useful if you want other users to contact you. You'll have, in addition, an instant message system in Panal, but remember, the more information you give about yourself, the easier is to reach you! The contact between users is very important, because its what it will really make things work. Imagine that you have a song, a reggae song, for example, and you want a guitar solo. You look for good reggae guitar players, and you ask them to add a file to the song, and there you are!
The files you have uploaded and downloaded will appear here with the posts and messages you have done and received, and your "Friends" in the community, the people you choose because you are more related to.


Search. This works as most of the search engines. You may search any file of Panal by name, instrument, tempo, key or time signature, user, etc.You can listen to the files there or download it to your computer to work with them later.

Community. This label will take you to Groups, Forum and Orders.
Groups: As you could have similar interests with other users (a kind of music or the educational work, as examples) you would like to have a place where you could chat or write about them, send your stuff. This groups will work as -virtual- meeting places to make easier to meet and reach to know other users.
Forum: is a list, like an email group, where you may ask questions about Panal, socialize learnings. All the interaction will be between users, helping each others.
Orders: When you have a song and you want to add it something, you can order it here. "Sitar in D for an Intro", "Jazz drum, 120 b.p.m.", "Solo for a beatles-kind song" could be some examples of orders in here.

3rd Part: Upload.

Just imagine if your songs could be taken by anyone, anywhere in the whole world, and be enriched with other instruments, scales, rhythms of any region in the globe.

The spirit of Panal is to create a virtual space where musicians could meet each other and share their own stuff. A space where a new kind of music, a new kind of cultural exchange, may exist. A community where a collective kind of composition might be the guideline, using the web like tool for the purpose.
The upload page is the place where you choose which of your own creations you would like to share with other users.
I’ll try to explain how it works. I hope you could help with the terms, because my English –again- could easily makes me stuck in the mud.
You’ll have six differents options for uploading your files. Remember that Panal is meant to be a working tool for the musician, not just a game, although it could be very fun. That’s why this step is so important, and we need to organize it like this.

Tracks: when you record a song, you do it channel per channel, in a multitrack way. One of the good things Panal have, is that the way of sharing your stuff will be exactly as that. This option let you upload a whole line of any instrument, as an independent, single track.

Samples: Tracks are not the unique kind of audio file you’d like to upload to Panal. A sample is a kind of file that has just one beat duration. Is just a “sound” (of any instrument) that we may use with a sequencer.

Loops: Loops are finite sequences or sounds that may help us to create our songs if we repeat it and we add some bass or guitar lines.
Panal could be a great samples and loops database, with a library of sounds that could be useful for any kind of Audio job: educational work, soundtracks, publishing.

Other Files: Like we all know, music is not make only with Audio. If you have Tabs, music scores or midi files that you want to share, this is the option you may choose.

Create Project: Panal lets you upload your files in a free way, or like a song, in a multitrack way. When you click “Create Project”, the files you’re uploading will be, all together, in a same folder. This will organize and make much easier the search work for you and the other users.

Publish Song: If we have a Mono or Stereo, mixdown version of any song that we want to show to the world, the “Publish Song” item is what you’re looking for. The Project has a lot of files, even from different users. The Song is a particular summary that one user made of a Project.

Here you have a example of Publish song, Track and Loop:

Get your own Flash MP3 Player


I hope that you all understand my explanation of the Upload page. If not, you just have to ask, and I promise to do my best to help you.

2nd Part: The "Home" page.

Ok! With the introduction done, i'll try to explaine how the structure (the "tree", we call it) of our site is. This is very difficult for me, because my english could be very tricky.

The structure of a site is the most important thing, and always depends in the usability and interaction we want it for. In other words, which are the things that our page needs to stand out, so the user can know exactly what the webpage is for, and activities that he or she could do in it, etc.
I must say that the design of the webpage is still under construction, so everyday we have modifications. So, the things I write today, we might changes them tomorrow. That's the danger of writing about movable things :-)


Home
Is the first place you'll arrive when you type our domain. In the Home you have the general data of the community. We could also divide it in three parts:
Header: the logo is here, with the register/sign in fields and the general labels of the site. This labels don't change when you navigate through the webpage, so you have them all the time just at "one click distance".
Body: It includes a short briefing of what's the page about, news, recently joined users or uploaded files and contests. Actually, it appears just OI because we have not decided yet the content of this box. I hope that by the weekend it might be complete. We also have two important buttons there, UPLOAD and SEARCH, because those are probably the most important actions to stand out. I hope, if I can explain myself, that at the end of this modest tutorial you could understand why.
Lower Part: I just don't know how is the name in english of this element of the site. It could be footer, like Floyd joked me about. There some links here that could be useful for users, but doesn't change the funcionality of the site: About Us, Help, Blog, Contact, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

You can see the webpage just as is right now, but I have to warn you that still needs a lot of work. Besides, it's the spanish version the only one working right now and you'll have to see it with Internet Explorer. I give you the link, likewise, because maybe you'd like to see how it grows. I hope it'll be more organized in a few days.

Greetings!

1st Part: Internet tendencies.

This post is written thinking in my classmates of the "Instructional Software, Internet & Digital Media" Course, in the Boston University. We (the guys working in RedPanal.com, the web page I'll try to explain in a few lines) think that Internet is in process of deep change. Taking some ideas of our spanish friend David De Ugarte, we could say that the "dot com" stage is ending, and the web is getting -since not to much years ago,up to the actual days- much plural, democratic, diverse. But, What is the meaning of this?
The first moment of internet development was when a bunch of people (we might say companies, in most of the cases) took the initiative and made some webpages. This is what we call the "dot com" stage. We won't talk to much about this, because is not the objective of the work. The important thing is to understand that in this stage, the web wasn't yet distributed, because the production of the content was in a few hands, the same hands that in the real world and the traditional media.

Graphic: Markus Angermeier.

The most important change we could say it was the weblogs invention and the spread of simple-to-use software and web applications. This aspect, that could seem not so important, modifies the structure itself of Internet. From now on, the content will be produced not by a few concentrated centers (the "dot com" stage) but by a lot of uncountable nodes.
O'Reilly called this new stage of Internet "web 2.0" (2001-2007), the opposite face of the web 1.0 of the beginning, the "dot com" stage (1998-2001). Transmitter and receiver won't be separate in the new stage of Internet. All the people may produce content for the web and make his own community to share it.
There's some applications that could be named as web 2.1, because they allow users to produce, share, modify and redistribute the content interactively. I show a brief list of applications web 2.0 and 2.1 that i took of the web page of David.

Our idea is to make a web 2.1 page for music. The next posts will be about how we are thinking to make it work.

I hope you could get a Weblog. It's a very simple to use and update web page, that you could get from a blog browser like Wordpress or Blogger. The registration is very simple too, just like the one you do for an email account in Yahoo, Gmail or the one you are actually using.
There are lots of spaces where bloggers meet each other, like del.icio.us or del.irio.us.
And, like a gift, a video that I like very much, about the web 2.0. Don't worry because it has a lot of technical things. It's the human aspect what I like the most. ;-)

Curso Bostoniense.

Ante todo una brevisima explicacion.
Por diversas razones dejamos este blog basatnte de lado. El desarrollo de Panal nos ha llevado mucho tiempo y cosas importantes han quedado subordinadas a esto.
Retomamos en principio con un par de posteos particulares. Uno de los nuestros esta en Boston, haciendo un curso de sobre "Software instructivo, Internet y Medios Digitales". El Curso tiene como una de sus tareas realizar un proyecto donde se cristalicen determinadas cosas vistas en el transcurso del mismo. La idea basica sera entonces armar un par de posteos explicando la logica de Panal como pagina web 2.1, teniendo como publico a los participantes del curso. Con lo cual, estaran escritos en ingles, ya que en su mayoria los mismos son de estas tierras.
Hecha la aclaracion, saben a que se enfrentan! ;-)