I got an email yesterday from someone asking me to include their gig in the short concert listing that appears in the right hand column. If you would like to have your gigs appear there, simply add them to Upcoming and send me a note to let me know about it. I simply have to click that I’m “watching” the event and it will automatically appear in the calendar, as well as allow other Upcoming users to have it included in their personal calendars. It’s cool and it’s free.

You may have noticed there is now a concert calendar on Nahenahe, in the right hand column below the polls. This is done using Upcoming. If you want to get your gig listed, simply create an account on Upcoming, post your gig there, and then contact me on Upcoming (my user id is “keoladonaghy”), and I’ll add your gig to my Upcoming calendar. Though I’ve added a few events in there myself, I won’t do it for everyone. Enter you gig there and let me know about it. Web 2.0 at its finest!

The Class of 2009 of Ke Kula ‘O Nāwahīokalani‘ōpu‘u (my daughter’s class) is engaged in some fund-raising projects to pay for their class’ activities, leading up to their graduation ceremonies in spring 2009. I’ve set up an Amazon.com AStore for the class to help them. If you purchase anything at Amazon.com, I’d like to ask your kokua by first visting their site, begin your search for products from their page, and they will earn a small commission from the sale. It doesn’t cost you any more to go this route. They are working on a class blog to keep family and friends abreast of their activites, and I will point to it when they are ready.

I looked back at the Nahenahe.net archives a few days ago, and realized that tomorrow, October 21, 2007, will mark the 10th anniversary of my conversion of Nahenahe.net to what is now called a blog format, inspired by blog, RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer’s Scripting News. Here are my very first posts. There are still about 1,500 post in the database that I need to do minor tweaks to in order to get them online.

Nahenahe.net did exist for a few years before that, but mostly had links to other artists sites, and I also housed a few artist sites on it as well. I certainly didn’t think that it would still be around today in this kind of format. Mahalo to everyone who has followed it for all these years, the artists who got their web presences started here, the labels who keep me in the loop, everyone else in the industry and Dave for the inspiration. Maybe for the 20th anniversary I’ll throw another online a real party.

“Live Green & Save” Eco-Fair will be held at Manoa Valley District Park Gym this Saturday, October 20, 2007, presented by Mālama o Mānoa in conjunction with Hawaiian Electric Company. Fun & Educational for the entire family, entertainment provided by Manoa DNA and Darryl Loo’s “Ohana O Mele” from Kaimuki High School.

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time in the past few months investigating and experimenting with a lot of the new social networking tools that have become very popular in technology circles. While I have been mostly looking into their ramifications for Hawaiian language speakers, I always keep my eyes out for ways in which the Hawaiian music community can also benefit. You’ll see a list of the various social networking sites that I inhabit in the left hand colum, such as MySpace, Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter and others.

What is interesting is the convergence of these technologies. You will find two new features in the right hand column of Nahenahe.net. The first is my iTunes playlist. When I play songs on iTunes, this info is automatically feed to my Last.fm account, which in turn is reflected automatically here on Nahenahe.net. While what I am listening to may or not be of interest, the second new features is syndication of my del.icio.us links, which has more valuable uses.

Del.icio.us is a great tool for creating a database of websites and blog posts you want to keep track of. While it is somewhat like creating bookmarks in your browser, they are stored on the web so you can access them anywhere. Where it is more powerful than your web browser’s bookmarks is how you can assign multiple tags to each of your links, rather than having to pick just one folder or category for it to be stored. For Firefox users, there is a powerful Firefox del.icio.us extension that allows you to replace the wimpy bookmark functionality of the browser with your del.icio.us links.

Anyway, I frequently come across news articles or tidbits regarding Hawaiian music that don’t necessarily rate getting a blog post or any commentary from me. So rather than clutter up Nahenahe.net with them, I create del.icio.us links from them, and the most recent ones will appear in the right hand column, below my iTunes playlist. You’ll see a few there right now and more will be added regularly. So be sure to check that block periodically when you visit. While there may not be a new blog post, there may be some new del.icio.us links. If all of this goes over your head, don’t worry, you’ll catch on

Aloha kākou. We’re back in Hilo and will be here for at least a few months, perhaps for good. Our family was denied entry into Ireland two weeks ago for reasons that are still difficult to believe. If you are interested, you can read the entire saga as it unfolded on my Culture Hack blog. I’m not up to talking about it anymore than I did there, nor am I interested in answering anymore questions about the ordeal. I will be reviving Nahenahe.net, at least until such time as I figure out what I will be doing in regards to Ph.d. studies. There is an outside chance we’ll try to return to Ireland in the spring, but not sure at this point. In the mean time, I’ll try to start digging up some new Hawaiian music news to post.

Radio producer Chad “Chaddie” Nakanishi has launched of Melepedia.com, a collaborative, online Hawaiian Music encyclopedia. Melepedia utlizes mediawiki which allows anyone with access to the internet the ability to create, edit, upload and link information about artists or relevant Hawaiian music topics. Be interesting to see how, or if, this develops.

My apologies for Nahenahe.net being down for most of the day. I was very concerned that the site was broken beyond repair, but a bit of research on the web led to the cure. For the geeks among you: the MySQL database that stores all of the data in WordPress (the blogging software that runs Nahenahe.net) was corrupted and needed to be repaired. It took a while to figure out how to do that, but I was happy to see the site come to life again within a few seconds after repairing the databases.

I’ve been playing around a bit with Last.fm, and it looks like a potentially valuable tool for artists and supporters to get music heard. It has an application that works in conjunction with your music player (such as iTunes), and uploads your playlist along with tags and recommendations to their site. People can view what you are listening to, see your thoughts. You can even add artist bios for people, and they are using a Wiki technology to allow for group editing. I did one for Kenneth here. It has some MySpace-like functionality, but the real focus here is on the music and building a social community of listeners. Artists can also get their music into the Last.fm radio stations which you can also listen to, and Kenneth has set up a page where listeners can hear his music, too.

Pretty cool technology with a lot of potential if it gains popularity. I would love to see them work with Apple to get this kind of of technology built right into iTunes. Then a million flowers would start to bloom, as Dave Winer is fond of saying. What Last.fm does is very similar to a project he did many years ago on MyFavoriteSongs.com, however, it used one of his programs, RadioUserland, which I used to use but had too many geek-oriented underpinnings to gain mainstream popularity. Last.fm is much more user friendly.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of an aggregator for Hawaiian music news feeds. What it does is gather new from the RSS feeds of various blogs and combines them into a reverse-chronological list of posts by the authors of these feeds. This sample shows what the aggregator has compiled from my own MySpace blog and the MySpace blogs of Bryan Tolentino, Kenneth Makuakāne, Steven Espaniola and Henry Kapono. If you have a blog with an RSS feed and would like to have it added to the aggregator send me the URL of your blog. It doesn’t have to be a MySpace blog, it can be any kind of blog as long as it has an RSS feed. If you don’t know if your blog has one, just point me to the blog and I’ll try to figure it out.

I need to acknowledge, again, Dave Winer who has been championing this “river of news” concept for a long time. I haven’t been totally sold on the concept for my own feed consumption, but do see it’s value in this kind of context.

OK, I got a bit tired of the old look, and also wanted to have a three column layout that made a bit more effective use of the space in the browser window. The header graphic may find it’s way back, but I don’t know for now. Part of my motivation in making this change was to upgrade WordPress and also add some new functionality to the site. If you experience any breakage, e kala mai (sorry!). Please leave a comment or email me.

I’m experimenting with a new voice messaging technology, and have added it here. If you look in the left hand column, you’ll see a “Voice Message” box. You can listen to the greeting I recorded, and add your own thoughts, up to two minutes in length. Please be aware that your message will not appear instantly – I must approve it first. Second, if you do leave a message, everyone who reads the website will be able to listen to it as well. Finally, I reserve the right to include any audio in my podcast, though obviously favor those recorded in Hawaiian.