The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

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jon_moore
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by jon_moore » Mon Dec 14, 2009 3:39 pm

Ideally I'd like to see a more granular level of forum categorisation. The categories at max4live.info are a good starting point:

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JM

http://leftside-wobble.blogspot.com/

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dtr
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by dtr » Mon Dec 14, 2009 4:04 pm

Isn't the issue going to settle itself over time? It can be expected that one of the existing forums (or perhaps a new one) is going to grow more popular than the others and after a while will effectively be the gathering place. Or perhaps the different forums will specialize, like C74 for the hardcore patchers and Ableton for the device browsers. (there is economy theory about this ;))

My feeling is the C74 forum has to play a role. That's where years and years of Max knowledge is archived. Anyone into serious patching automatically ends up there.

Btw, I too feel it 's quite a drag to have to search for info in all these different online places. I'm both a long time Max and Ableton user.

technog0d
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by technog0d » Mon Dec 14, 2009 5:05 pm

@Jon_moore

Thanks for mentioning my forums.

@All

I have been trying to stay out of this debate because I definitely have my own agenda on this topic. I created max4live.info to be a unofficial community around the product Max For Live. The one thing that i though about was the fact that there are many places to go for Live and Max/MSP/Jitter info. The information is definitely out there and it has been out there for a long time. However, There are a lot of new users and it could be quite overwhelming for a new user to know exactly what they are looking for. So... My site has never been created with the intention to recreate the resources that are already out there, but to give people that central community to be able to converse and find resources easily.

My intention was to have people interested in Max For Live come to my site and then have enough information on there that can then direct them to Ableton, Cycling74, or whoever else's site. I would love to see my forums become more active, because that would create more of a community. I would have to say that in the last 2 weeks, my membership has doubled and the forums are just starting to become more active.

On the topic of support from Ableton and/or cycling 74... I would not say that i do not have support from the two companies. They provide information when needed and I definitely have contacts within the companies. They do not tell me which way to go with my site. But, They are very helpful in providing any information that i need in terms of help. I am not sure what other information people are looking for that they think they would get more of if it was officially supported by Ableton and/or Cycling74.

At the end of the day, I am not going to tell people to only go to my forums or, for that matter, only my site. I would encourage people to go to the areas on the internet that provide the information that they need and the resources they require. I will continue to do my thing on my site and hopefully people will come and enjoy it. It's up to the people in the community to decide where to go and what resource is going to be more popular on the internet and thus have more information and continue to build.

Alright... That is enough for today. Just my little perspective.

In any which way you decide... Just Have fun and learn Max and Max For Live. The benefits are huge!

Mike
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jon_moore
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by jon_moore » Mon Dec 14, 2009 6:06 pm

technog0d wrote:@Jon_moore

Thanks for mentioning my forums.

@All

I have been trying to stay out of this debate because I definitely have my own agenda on this topic. I created max4live.info to be a unofficial community around the product Max For Live. The one thing that i though about was the fact that there are many places to go for Live and Max/MSP/Jitter info. The information is definitely out there and it has been out there for a long time. However, There are a lot of new users and it could be quite overwhelming for a new user to know exactly what they are looking for. So... My site has never been created with the intention to recreate the resources that are already out there, but to give people that central community to be able to converse and find resources easily.

My intention was to have people interested in Max For Live come to my site and then have enough information on there that can then direct them to Ableton, Cycling74, or whoever else's site. I would love to see my forums become more active, because that would create more of a community. I would have to say that in the last 2 weeks, my membership has doubled and the forums are just starting to become more active.

On the topic of support from Ableton and/or cycling 74... I would not say that i do not have support from the two companies. They provide information when needed and I definitely have contacts within the companies. They do not tell me which way to go with my site. But, They are very helpful in providing any information that i need in terms of help. I am not sure what other information people are looking for that they think they would get more of if it was officially supported by Ableton and/or Cycling74.

At the end of the day, I am not going to tell people to only go to my forums or, for that matter, only my site. I would encourage people to go to the areas on the internet that provide the information that they need and the resources they require. I will continue to do my thing on my site and hopefully people will come and enjoy it. It's up to the people in the community to decide where to go and what resource is going to be more popular on the internet and thus have more information and continue to build.

Alright... That is enough for today. Just my little perspective.

In any which way you decide... Just Have fun and learn Max and Max For Live. The benefits are huge!

Mike
I salute you for your efforts Mike. It's great that you look at M4L is a product in and of itself and that you categorise things in a way that recognises the wide range of applications M4L can be put to.

I noticed that Clint (the chap behind the maxforlive.com device library), has started an RSS feed for new devices added to the library. This might be a good approach for all of the third parties community sites to pursue. That way people can subscribe to all of their favourite M4L related RSS resources and easily keep up with info from multiple sources. I'm aware that the blog side of your site is RSS enabled but as I understand it, the Forum is as yet not. If all the different available resources published via RSS, I could build a simple starter page where you could view all activity across the M4L community at a glance (much like http://web20.originalsignal.com/ ). People could also of course use their own RSS tools of choice iGoogle, Netvibes etc.

Another great benefit of everything being published to RSS is that it will make it easy to search across all available resources at once!
JM

http://leftside-wobble.blogspot.com/

MacBook Pro 2.8 (10.5.6)

jon_moore
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by jon_moore » Mon Dec 14, 2009 6:25 pm

The Cycling'74 forums are already RSS enabled and to a granular level too. You can for instance choose to subscribe to all M4L 'Recent Posts' or 'Recent Subjects'. If everbody else gets on the RSS train job done - de-centalised authoring but with centralised access.

I for one would be a very happy chap!
JM

http://leftside-wobble.blogspot.com/

MacBook Pro 2.8 (10.5.6)

håkan bråkan
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by håkan bråkan » Mon Dec 14, 2009 7:43 pm

I think the importance of a forum for m4l is even greater than for live, and especially as the documentation is quite sparse. A good official forum will relieve the support forum at ableton a great deal as well.

I'm really glad there are forums at other places now but I think the risk of not having an official forum is that a great m4l community won't evolve and that it will be too unfocused and too much clicking as other users stated. I think one of the biggest reasons why the monome has been so successful for example is the strong and evolving community with a constant development of new applications, and interaction between users and developers is the key for great applications.

Tone Deft
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by Tone Deft » Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:32 am

C74 is about to create a forum for sharing projects. coincidence?

http://cycling74.com/community/
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Gregory Taylor
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by Gregory Taylor » Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:43 am

The great Empirical philosophers (David Hume, in particular) are well known for formulating the notion of events which are "contiguous" and those which can be said to be "causal," and - rightly - point out that they may be confused (with occasionally humorous results).

"I got into the bathtub and the phone rang. I therefore conclude that water attracts electricity."

Machinate
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by Machinate » Tue Dec 15, 2009 6:39 pm

Gregory Taylor wrote:The great Empirical philosophers (David Hume, in particular) are well known for formulating the notion of events which are "contiguous" and those which can be said to be "causal," and - rightly - point out that they may be confused (with occasionally humorous results).

"I got into the bathtub and the phone rang. I therefore conclude that water attracts electricity."
I actually think that's the accidental fallacy, which dates back to Aristotle... I could be wrong about the type, but it's definitely a classic syllogism. And yes, they're funny :) Musing over these things was quite en vogue in Humes time, though. Danish writer and philosopher, a contemporary of Humes famously wrote a similar syllogism in Erasmus Montanus or Rasmus Berg in 1723 - "Mother can't fly. A rock can't fly. Ergo, mother is a rock."

Now Gregory, perhaps you can check with Ableton whether or not this forum is permanent? I asked in another thread but got no answer. I would feel weirc contributing a lot to a less-than-permanent forum here.

andreas.
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jon_moore
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by jon_moore » Tue Dec 15, 2009 8:08 pm

Machinate wrote:
Gregory Taylor wrote:The great Empirical philosophers (David Hume, in particular) are well known for formulating the notion of events which are "contiguous" and those which can be said to be "causal," and - rightly - point out that they may be confused (with occasionally humorous results).

"I got into the bathtub and the phone rang. I therefore conclude that water attracts electricity."
I actually think that's the accidental fallacy, which dates back to Aristotle... I could be wrong about the type, but it's definitely a classic syllogism. And yes, they're funny :) Musing over these things was quite en vogue in Humes time, though. Danish writer and philosopher, a contemporary of Humes famously wrote a similar syllogism in Erasmus Montanus or Rasmus Berg in 1723 - "Mother can't fly. A rock can't fly. Ergo, mother is a rock."

Now Gregory, perhaps you can check with Ableton whether or not this forum is permanent? I asked in another thread but got no answer. I would feel weird contributing a lot to a less-than-permanent forum here.


andreas.
+1
JM

http://leftside-wobble.blogspot.com/

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Dennis DeSantis
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by Dennis DeSantis » Wed Dec 16, 2009 4:44 pm

Hi folks,

Sorry to take so long for an "official" Ableton response to this topic but, as always, we're buried in projects.

I would say that for now, the best solution would be the one Gregory proposed - ignore the word "Beta" in this forum's name. For all intents and purposes, this is Ableton's official location for Max for Live discussion. We'll change the name soon, and we have plans to reorganize the Ableton forums in general in the near future to make things easier to navigate.

But just because this is OUR official spot for these discussions doesn't necessitate that it's the most active one or even the most useful one. There are also communities at and around Cycling '74's website, as well as the enormously valuable third-party sites such as those run by Clint and Mike.

For right now (and perhaps forever), Cycling's forums are probably much more valuable than Ableton's for users seeking information about the finer points of Max programming. For users looking for a device repository, we simply have nothing to offer right now. maxforlive.com provides a solution here.

As for whether or not it makes more sense to create a single central point for discussion or to let it evolve naturally, we don't have an answer. We certainly could have invested time in developing a better forum structure in preparation for the release, but this would have strained resources and we would have had no way of knowing if it would become the preferred space.

It's also important to us (and I assume to Cycling) to meet users where they are. Maybe Cycling's forums are a more natural place for a certain user simply because that user already feels like they're part of a community there (and vice versa).

In short: if you're getting the information you need, then you're at the right place. I hope this helps to clarify the situation.

Best,

jon_moore
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by jon_moore » Wed Dec 16, 2009 4:58 pm

Dennis DeSantis wrote:Hi folks,

Sorry to take so long for an "official" Ableton response to this topic but, as always, we're buried in projects.

I would say that for now, the best solution would be the one Gregory proposed - ignore the word "Beta" in this forum's name. For all intents and purposes, this is Ableton's official location for Max for Live discussion. We'll change the name soon, and we have plans to reorganize the Ableton forums in general in the near future to make things easier to navigate.

But just because this is OUR official spot for these discussions doesn't necessitate that it's the most active one or even the most useful one. There are also communities at and around Cycling '74's website, as well as the enormously valuable third-party sites such as those run by Clint and Mike.

For right now (and perhaps forever), Cycling's forums are probably much more valuable than Ableton's for users seeking information about the finer points of Max programming. For users looking for a device repository, we simply have nothing to offer right now. maxforlive.com provides a solution here.

As for whether or not it makes more sense to create a single central point for discussion or to let it evolve naturally, we don't have an answer. We certainly could have invested time in developing a better forum structure in preparation for the release, but this would have strained resources and we would have had no way of knowing if it would become the preferred space.

It's also important to us (and I assume to Cycling) to meet users where they are. Maybe Cycling's forums are a more natural place for a certain user simply because that user already feels like they're part of a community there (and vice versa).

In short: if you're getting the information you need, then you're at the right place. I hope this helps to clarify the situation.

Best,
Thanks for responding on the Dennis.

When you reorganise the forums are you likely to RSS enable them? The difficulty at the moment is not necessarily one of lack of information but keeping up on information from multiple sources. C74's forums are RSS enabled as is the maxforlive.com device library. If the Ableton forums were RSS enabled a user will be able to both keep an overview of the available information and more importantly search across all resources at once.
JM

http://leftside-wobble.blogspot.com/

MacBook Pro 2.8 (10.5.6)

Dennis DeSantis
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by Dennis DeSantis » Wed Dec 16, 2009 5:48 pm

When you reorganise the forums are you likely to RSS enable them?
Probably not in the near future. We're exploring entirely different forum technologies, so until we decide what direction we want to take, I don't expect that we'll make huge changes to the current tech.

Any changes we make in the near future will be primarily conceptual and/or philosophical.

Best,

jon_moore
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by jon_moore » Wed Dec 16, 2009 6:25 pm

Dennis DeSantis wrote: Probably not in the near future. We're exploring entirely different forum technologies, so until we decide what direction we want to take, I don't expect that we'll make huge changes to the current tech.
All cool. One for the consideration list while you're looking at new forum technologies I hope! :wink:

Best
JM

http://leftside-wobble.blogspot.com/

MacBook Pro 2.8 (10.5.6)

bulo
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Re: The lack of a good, centralized M4L Community?

Post by bulo » Wed Dec 16, 2009 11:28 pm

Let's go to Mike's !!!
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