Hi all

What a difficult night/evening/afternoon/morning it's been here in Australia/India/England/the USA!

We've stabilized the problems that occurred (it was all related to the new RSS feed), and we'll get back to you again later once everything is fixed. But for now, please be aware of the following two faults:

1) the front page of MusBook is displaying an absurd amount of imported blogs from various orchestras, individuals etc.

2) If you've updated your profile, or if you've joined the site since 21th September, there may be problems with your profile displayed.

Our development team in India is working late into the evening to get this sorted, and we'll update you again in a few hours.

Other than these two issues, full service has been restored to the site and you can continue to enjoy MusBook.com as normal. Apologies for the downtime earlier - we think the site was only unavailable for around 15-20 minutes, so we hope it didn't cause you too much inconvenience.

Thanks for your patience. A site like this is so large and complex that it's not easy to get everything right first time. But with your support, we'll succeed.

More in a couple of hours.

Yours,

- The MusBook team.

We're currently experiencing a problem with the site, as you may be aware.

Don't worry, but bear with us. These things happen. We're going to need a few minutes to sort this out.

We'll issue an update on the blog within the next hour.

- The MusBook Team

Well, we finally have RSS! What this means is that from today, if you've filled in the 'social media' section of your profile information, then your external blog posts and podcasts (and, on your profile page, your Twitter status) will syndicate directly to MusBook.com. All you have to do to make this happen is... NOTHING!

That's right... once you've copied your blog feed into your account then it's all automatic; without having to lift a finger, your work - be it music or words - will be injected straight into the growing MusBook.com community. It's terrifically exciting, because once we have thousands of musicians and music organizations from around the world signed up to the site, there'll be a constant self-renewing stream of exciting new music and musical material for you to enjoy. It's going to be amazing.

For musicians and arts organizations, this will be an unparalleled opportunity to connect your content directly with the global music community. And for music lovers, well... the best-ever direct access to musical work from everywhere, regardless of where you are! The world became a global village some time ago... it's finally time for the world of music to catch up ;)

**

Pictures

Although we don't yet have pictures coming in from external RSS feeds, you'll now see pictures from anything posted directly on the site, such as job listings, blog posts, and products. We'll also be introducing a lot more colour to the site soon, with many more icons on the front page feed so that you can see at a glance who is posting what. It'll be more interesting to look at too.

**

Filtering

Well the big question now is what will happen when thousands of blogs and podcasts are syndicating to the site every day...  the reality is that the information is never going to stop, so to prevent us all from getting overwhelmed, we're going to have to start working on sophisticated filter systems that get you the information you are interested in, and filter out the things you're not interested in. An even bigger challenge: we have to manage to do this whilst at the same time maintaining a pure user-driven meritocracy that protects traditions and eschews fads, with none of the over-hierarchical problems of the old music industry.

We won't get it right first time (in fact it's likely we'll fail dismally the first time, but that's OK!), but with your help, we'll do our best. Ideas always very welcome,. ideally on this blog, or in confidence to support @ musbook.com. We really do react very fast to brilliant suggestions. If there's something we should be doing and you can see it and we can't, pleeeeeeeeeease tell us!

Thanks for listening! and enjoy the new tsunami of music coming your way :)

Yours,

- The MusBook Team

Hello Everyone,

Well, this is the final week where you will find the front page of MusBook to be moderately boring! ... We've finally taken delivery of the new functionality on our test site, and we'll be stress testing it over the weekend whilst our development team in India take a well earned break for Puja day!

We'll be back on Tuesday, fixing any last minute bugs and tweaks, and then hope to get the RSS out on the site by the end of the week.

From then on, you'll be able to synchronize you blogs, podcasts and vodcasts from external sites, so that they pop up on your MusBook profile (and indeed on the front page feed as well, so that you can reach out to the whole music community - great publicty!)

Obviously, as the flood of users who will start to join MusBook over the next week or two start to add their content, we'll have need for a filter system so that you get the information that interests you (and so that the front page feed doesn't refresh itself with a hundred new feeds every second!). But we'll introduce all those things gradually.

Similarly, the RSS functionality will have many refinements and improvements that will need to be made, so don't hesitate to let us know what we can do to improve your experience, and we'll get it sorted as soon as we can!

In preparation for the new RSS...

Log in, click 'edit profile information', anc check your 'social media' section. There, you can add your blog or podcast feed. It's usually a long web address ending with either .xml or .rss.

Any questions? Just leave a note on this blog and we'll be pleased to help!

Yours,

- The MusBook Team

Hi Everyone!

Classical Music Jobs

We've upgraded the 'Classical Music Jobs' section of the site. Jobs now expire after their closing date, and you can also limit the listings displayed to just one country, so that you can filter out all the jobs that aren't based in your country.

There's probably still plenty we need to change, but we won't find out exactly what until we start the user testing process in a few weeks. So if there's anything blindingly obvious that we've missed, please let us know and we'll fix it.

Twitter

We've now, with some limitations, reinstalled the twitter compatibility to your profiles. Again, we'd love to know what you think.

Yours,

- The MusBook Team

Hi Everyone

We just wanted to let you know that we've temporarily taken our integration with Twitter offline. Reason being, our new maxim is perfecting what we have, rather than introducing more and more features!

We'll bring the Twitter facility back, but only once we've cleaned up the MusBook status system, and worked out the best ways of combining it (feedback always welcome!) - whether it should reflect Twitter status, provide MusBook-specific status for users, or even something entirely different, like relay what you're listening too. In it's current form, it was updating the MusBook status with your Twitter status, but not doing the same in reverse, which wasn't really very good.

Anyway, we could be a few weeks with that. But be assured it's on the list.

Yours,

- The MusBook Team

Hello Everyone... What do you think about the front page of MusBook.com?

We've taken away the preview panel and the welcome message that was there before. It's a kind of tacet acknowledgement that - unlike most Classical (and Jazz, and Contemporary!) Music sites on the web... MusBook is ultimately not about editorial, but about aggregation.

New users will eventually get some kind of welcome message the first time they log in (it will appear above the feed, where the preview panel used to be) to tell them what to do, so don't worry about that. We want to know what it looks like to you if you've been using MusBook for a little while now, and you know how things work.

Do you like it? Hate it? - we do have the option of putting it back to where it was, but this layout just might be a little more effective.

Coming up later this week...

At the moment, the front page feed shows only things that people actually post to the site. And as not very many people know about MusBook yet, that's why it's not very busy at the moment. But imagine if it instead showed every single new blog post, podcast, or live music event from the websites of every orchestra, venue, artist in the world.....    [filterable, of course, so it doesn't get too busy]

...well that's going to happen starting about a week from now! If you've been a member of the new MusBook site for a while, you might not have seen this, but in your account (click 'edit profile information') there's a new page called 'Social Media'. There, you can just type in the address of your blog, podcast or vodcast feed, and it will be syndicated directly to MusBook.com! Rather than having to go out there and promote your feed to people, it just gets sucked into the MusBook ecosystem, and anyone using the MusBook.com site will be able to see your work, share it, comment on it, and ultimately... follow it back to your MusBook profile, and then to your external website!

If we get this right, it could be a whole new way of reaching out to each other - whether as a musician trying to get your work seen and heard, to an established music group or organization as part of your overall marketing plan, or most importantly a music lover who wants to keep track of many different performers and venues.

We really need your feedback. Please, please let us know if this benefits you, or if you don't like it, or what we can change. The easiest way is just to leave a comment on this blog post, but you can also contact us privately at support (at) musbook (dot) com.

Thank you for listening!

Yours,

- The MusBook Team

Hello Everyone!

Well, we're less than a week away from having fully-fledged RSS facilities on MusBook.com, which means less than a week until the MusBook front page becomes a neverending flow of new blogs, news, videos, podcasts, live streams, and .... well anything and everything in the online world of Classical, Jazz and Contemporary music! All musicians will have to do is create, all listeners will have to do is consume. We'll do the rest!

In the meantime, we've been doing a little housekeeping.

You'll notice some small changes like the hyperlinks on the front page boxes(in the right and left hand columns), so that you can click to jump straight to your favourite section of the site, without having to use the main navigation bar.

On the 'people' page, you can see at a glance who plays which instrument, because there are now cute little icons (like on the music teacher map) that show you what people play!

We've also made a load of tiny little changes that you won't notice - cleaning up the sign up process, changing the wording on some buttons, making descriptions clearer, eliminating a couple of style bugs, and other such things that sound trivial, but if they're wrong, can really get in the way of a good user experience.

In the near future...

We've got the first draft of our development plan for the next 3-6 months through, and it's looking really exciting. We're approaching the time when the site will suddenly take on a life of its own (hopefully as soon as the RSS functionality and Consanfron are ready, you'll see the difference in a BIG way!). And then, the site will become more and more useful, because of course, the more people there are using a network, the more interesting it comes...

More in a day or two....!

Yours,

The MusBook Team

Hi Everyone!

From today onwards, we'll be creating  a new release of the MusBook.com site every weekday. Sometimes it'll be a very minor release - just a few bugs for example - and other days it will be a major release, like a big new feature or set of tools.

This will happen at 1am PST / 5am EST / 10am UK time / 2.30pm IST / 7pm Melbourne time each day.

We'll generally write a blog post within an hour or two of the update if there's anything notable to tell you about!

As we grow, we're introducing new ways of working - as well as security and backup procedures - that will make the site better and better. You'll see increased stability from today - we're moving fast towards a kind of beta state where you shouldn't be seeing many errors on the site any more. If you do - please let us know, and we'll fix them immediately!

We're also working on improving the site performance, and planning the next few months of development including a complete visual redesign - your feedback as always would be gratefully received! support [at] musbook [dot] com

Yours,

-The MusBook Team

 Hi Everyone!

Well, you might have noticed that the past couple of days have seen an explosion of visitors and new members of the site, and we're excited to welcome many new people here to MusBook.com!

But this is just the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. There's SO much to do!

Social Media - YOUR blogs, podcasts, and video webcasts...

Today, we uploaded something really small that you won't have noticed. But it's REALLY important. If you go into the 'edit profile information' link in your profile you'll now see a 'SOCIAL MEDIA' tab, with four boxes. All you need to do is add the RSS feed of your blog (could also be an XML feed).

Then, this will happen...

At some point in the next few days, all the blogs, twitter and podcast links that you've added will appear across the MusBook site! - Whether you're a musician sending out your latest music clips, or a music writer blogging to the world, you'll no longer have to rely on your own audience... your work will be sucked into the MusBook ecosystem, and thousands of people will be able to see your work here on MusBook.com!

Better than that, as people share, 'like', or add stars to your videos, blog posts and music tracks, they'll ascend through the different sections of MusBook.com and get seen by more and more people... yes, that's right, for the first time, we'll all be able to forget about promoting our work and just go and make great stuff! It will all just happen automatically.

So... click on 'Edit Profile Information' (it's under 'My Profile, top left near the home button), and add your blog/podcast feeds today... you could be amongst the very first musicians, composers and writers to be part of the MusBook.com world!

Yours excitedly,

The MusBook.com Team :)

 Hi Everyone!

We'll post a full update soon, but today and tomorrow are big troubleshooting days - rather than focusing on development of new features, we're zipping through a long list of tiny little tweaks and improvements that have been noted over the past week or so.

But the most obvious one is that the Music Teacher Map is starting to become full of sweet little icons!!! We will have the rest of the icons up by the end of the week, and then it will be the most gorgeous map, with little instruments all over the world showing where all the music teachers are!

If you're a music teacher, don't wait - sign up now!

More Soon!

Yours,

The MusBook Team :)