I'm terribly excited to spend some time this winter working on some new AV performances that feature fully-synced audio and video clips (got some groovy live film remix concepts I'm working on) using both Ableton Live and Resolume 3x at the same time!

The electronic music scene in India itself is fairly young; perhaps finding its roots at the end of the 1990s when artists like the Midival Punditz first started producing and releasing music.  Funnily enough, the aesthetic of electronic music being produced in India bears resemblance to the more niche electronica we stream and release which mainly comes from Indian Diaspora communities around the world.

I'll be writing a series of features exploring this more in-depth at the start of the new year - until then, check out this post on the Hindustan Times' livemint.com which introduces some producers driving scenes in India. more »

I've advocated the benefits of keeping control of one's own data for some time - with the proliferance of 3rd party/hosted services on the web in the past few years though, I've had to rethink why it is important to not use them to host content or parts of your website.

One of the coolest innovations I've seen in the past couple of years on the web, which has me favouring hosted solutions rather than local ones, are 3rd party comment system providers.  Its now possible to have a service like Disqus or IntenseDebate power the entire commenting function for a site via a javascript call to their service!

This is really groovy for many reasons - including:

• Not having to worry about upgrading the version of your Joomla-local commenting extension,
• You can optionally include commenting wherever you want on your site,
• Because its the business of these service providers to make their system as kick-ass as possible, you know that you'll get all the newest features/functionality when it comes out,
• They're free.

Recently, the good folks @ Rockettheme released a great extension which brings the simple power of using either Disqus or IntenseDebate (which is owned by Automatik - the Wordpress people) to Joomla and I recommend installing it on your Joomla site today.

We were about to switch over to using Rokcomment with IntenseDebate here on whyjoomla.com this week (as we've already done @ plantseedling.com) but are holding out to see what a new version of iJoomlacomment will look like when akismet is working properly and recaptcha has been implemented...

Honestly, if you're rolling out a new site which doesn't have old comments then its a no-brainer; grab Rokcomment and breathe easy knowing that you'll likely never have to login to your site to delete spammy comments and that your site users will find it a breeze to post their thoughts on your articles.