Kendra Hub - Media Asset/Content Management, Semantic Syndication/Promotion and Commerce Tool

I agree with the idea behind this initiative, and I'm excited to see some development in this area (since I run a band website myself and music distribution is indeed a big challenge).

However, I believe it is important to avoid a "complete package" or "one-stop-shop" mentality. Let's face it; when orchestrating all of the different features into a system like you're proposing, there is no simple turn-key solution. It would make more sense to deploy this system as a suite of modules, each of which manages one feature. This presents the opportunity for designers to use only the features they want/need. It also lays the groundwork for robust APIs so that developers can extend the features they need in a more granular fashion. In my opinion, a good model for deployment would be Media Mover which is broken down into a series of modules for the same reasons.

1. Drupal eCommerce API

I think it's worth suggesting that you look at the new Drupal eCommerce API as an alternative to Ubercart for this project.

I've been playing around with it recently and the way it's structured might suit an initiative like yours more than Ubercart. Ubercart is very good, but, it's striving to be a turnkey shop solution like Magento or previous versions of Drupal eCommerce. In other words, the new Drupal eCommerce API is a complete re-write towards a more native and expansive eCommerce solution for Drupal.

That said..the new Drupal eCommerce API requires a much higher level of Drupal savvy than perhaps Ubercart/Magento/Oscommerce and others. On the flip-side, it's much much lighter and efficient (code-wise)...which may make it a better candidate for building a Kendra hub in the way you described. That's not to say it's better than Ubercart...I'm just suggesting that that Ubercart is a good turnkey solution for beginners and intermediate drupal developers whereas the new Drupal eCommerce API is designed for more sophisticated and enterprise-level solutions.

1. Localisation

It's easier to apply localisation to a project if it's planned at the outset, rather than added in later. So, while the lead language for the project is obvioiusly English and it will make sense to develop betas in English, it maybe worth adding in provisions for localisation at the outset..even if it just covers FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish). That's not to say you introduce extra costs of translation at the development stage, rather including the foundation stones for localisation..e.g. all the developers understand that they are building towards a multilingual solution and code with that in mind.

cheers

Dub

There's definitely a huge need for tools that make it easy for producers to distribute and monetize their content. Even if the tools exist, it's a challenge to get them in the hands of the artists. Whatever the solution ends up being, it has to be drop dead easy to use, portable (i.e. it's something that can be integrated into any website), and more importantly, the artist needs to know that it exists.

I'm still trying to grasp this proposal, so please bear with my silly questions. First off, is this going to be a site where the artist has to create an account (ala myspace, virb, etc.) or can they integrate into their own website? How would the Kendra Hub be different from third party solutions like Topspin or iLike (related thread here)? And to Aaron's point, there's been some amazing innovation lately in Drupal media which could be very complimentary to this project.

Don't get me wrong - I'm for any solution that's going to make it easy for content creators to make a living. If anything, the sooner we can make it happen, the better.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Hi,

This is exactly what we need.. ready to go solutions.. with the building blocks also available. Whether or not this gets accepted http://groups.drupal.org/node/19479

I'd still love to discuss offering your ready to go sites free for musicians starting out.

I think we could easily provide place where
- modules exist - available for one click install - working example http://www.screencast.com/t/dElHPEz6
- we could also "template" sites in various states of setup

That way people could get the blocks and built it themselves
or if they just want to plug and play they could..

Would love to give you access so we can move it forward,
i have a friend who's a poet.. and this would be perfect for him.

The KDI is currently on hiatus and is not passing along proposals for funding. We hope that Knight will re-launch the project within 2009.

If and when we re-open, I will be sure that we circle back to this proposal. But I would continue to pursue other sources of funding right now.

Apologies if this has not been clear.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/

Was researching for a different, but, not unrelated project this morning and had an idea for the kendra hub team that might be worth suggesting.

An example would be MYCONTENT.COM which is launching in the USA this summer. No idea who is behind it. I just got an email from a pal in the US who heard about it

http://www.mycontent.com/AboutUs.aspx

The following bullet points are copied from the site:

About mycontent.com

• It is a mass distribution platform for anyone to share their work with everyone.
• It is an e-commerce infrastructure complete with a pre-established network of advertisers, a platform for easily selling premium content, and payment mechanisms in place so that artists can properly be remunerated from Day 1.
• It's the ability to upload all content: videos, photos, and audio. Set your price point to sell it, or put it out there for free. The choice is yours, it's YOUR content.
• Reach millions of potential customers instantly with our extensive social networking platform.

mycontent.com Experience

• An instant distribution platform for bands, indie filmmakers, networks, labels, and individuals.
• No longer having to pay thousands of dollars to build & manage your own site.
• Setting up (upload, arrange, categorize, sell) and design your own web store/social networking page/mass distribution platform in minutes.
• Communicating with your fans and marketing to them in a way never before thought imaginable.
• Monetizing all media (video clips, songs, photos) that otherwise were collecting dust through both our extensive network of advertisers, and PPV events.
• Encouraging new content creation, since e-commerce infrastructure is already in place.
• Access millions of consumers overnight through an extensive social networking platform.

It's very ambitious, due for launch in the Summer and while the details on the site are a little sketchy (most of the info. is bullet points about what they want to do) it will be interesting to see how it pans out - it's not a million miles from this kendra hub idea - and I was going to suggest the following:

I think there will be a flurry of initiatives like this over the next year or two. The number of Social Networking sites online went past the 1 million mark recently and I think it's only a natural progression for "kendra hub" initiatives to follow....where, instead of people posting content to websites willy-nilly and the domain owners creaming all the ad revenue and profits, creatives will swing more to kendra hub type initiatives so they can get something in return.

The interesting thing about this is that I think creatives will register for a number of hubs...in the same way an artist/band will tend to register on myspace, bebo, imeem, facebook and last.fm to promote their own work.

In other words, would it be a smarter idea to re-jig the kendra-hub proposal to ping these new emerging hub sites with a view of Drupal integration?

As a simple example, whatabout pinging the guys behind mycontent.com (or other similar hub sites, like istockphoto.com etc.) and offering to create an integration module for Drupal?

Thet would provide immediate value to the Drupal community, would require much less funding and may open up an opportunity down the road to build your own kendra hub, based on the experience and knowledge of other succes stories.

You guys have obviously done a lot of work already in this area and it would be a shame to see the project stall and let that effort and energy slip. I know what I'm suggesting it's quite a shift away from the original idea for the kendra hub, but, I think the original idea was a little ambitious and requires a significant amount of funding to get up and running. Approaching it in the way suggested will require less funding...deliver immediate value back to the drupal community and can still act as a stepping stone towards the original goals.

Hope that makes sense...

dub

I've just set up the Kendra Hub presentation at Drupalcon Paris. If you are attending the conference please show your support and slip it a vote:

http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/session/using-drupal-media-asset-content-...

It's rather late in the day and near the deadline so it needs all the help it can get.

Many thanks!

Cheers Daniel

I help run a very old, very independent label called Southern Records in London. Some of you might know us through our work with bands like Crass, Babes in Toyland, Karate, and William Elliott Whitmore (and hundreds of others) as well as through our partnerships with Subhumans, Nomeansno, and Dischord Records, home of Minor Threat and Fugazi. We've been developing on Unix, Linux and using open source software for a very long time. We've always been a bit heavy on technology because it's allowed us to do things for ourselves that previously only major labels and Very Big "Independents" were able to do.

I've noticed that open source software is getting better and better and much easier to use than ever before, especially in the area of Content Management Systems, which have become complete Content Management Frameworks, suitable for data that goes far beyond displaying stuff on the web. The Kendra Hub proposal looks like step in the right direction. Kendra also looks like exactly the sort of thing that we could use and contribute meaningfully to since we've got a lot of expertise in dealing with various metadata standards, and of course we have a pretty good idea about the kinds of things artists and labels need to get by in the music business.

At Southern, we actually have our own complete digital distribution system, written in Perl--or "congealed" in Perl, as the original developer Dave Coles would put it. The system rips, encodes the audio (as FLAC), stores metadata (as XML), and exports the metadata to various formats used by various retailers and aggregators. The system isn't particularly usable by non-experts though, as it relies on the command line and is dependent on human intervention to do the actual content delivery bit. Still, I can't help but feeling that the Southern Digital Distribution system could be helpful to a lot of other labels.

Kendra appears to be interested in developing a solution for content delivery using Drupal. That's very interesting for us, despite Drupal beinig written in a vile language like PHP. ;)

When I get some time, my plan is to clean up this code and make it available under the GPL. I'm starting to think that, for the sake of getting the code out there before we all go bankrupt, my standards for "clean" might need to be lowered.

One of the problems about being a label and distributing digital content directly to retailers is that most of them cannot be bothered importing one's internal metadata standard. Some will go so far as to accept the data on spreadsheets, but that's no way for two IT systems to be communicating. That said, I also understand why the retailers might not be interested--very few labels have enough content to deliver to them to make this worth their while. However, if we had an open music catalogue metadata standard that actually got used by enough labels and artists, there would be enough of an incentive for the retailers to import this metadata directly. This is what they do for the big digital distributors ("aggregators") like IODA.

It looks like the Kendra Initiative wants to address this problem as well.

We, like a lot of independent labels, don't make much money from individual sales, so each sale is precious to us and to our artist partners. There are a lot of sites out there making a lot of advertising revenue, and advertisers getting lots of clicks, off the fruits of our labour. That just isn't fair, so I've also written some software to help automate the reporting of copyright infringement. This is another aspect of the music business that artists and labels might be interested in developing further.

What I would like to see is an inventory of this project. Have you created any specifications? What modules will the Hub modules require? Do you have any code? I'd like to see a github repository (or similar) for all project files. We've got code we would like to share, albeit in another language, and we would like to see what others are prepared to share.

If the project is going to happen, I would like to participate in it. It could be a crash course in Drupal for me.

I've just resubmitted Kendra Hub - http://cli.gs/6qsJN9 - to the competition. It would be great to get some feedback from the Drupal community with any refinements you think I could make.

Thanks!

Cheers Daniel

Come to the Kendra Hub BoF at DrupalCon Amsterdam today.

Yep. We finally got funding from the UK government.

Kendra Hub - Business Dashboard for Musicians

https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/bof/kendra-hub-business-dashboard-music...

Room: G108 · Capgemini
Time slot: Wednesday · 17:00-18:00