Recording a martial arts training session in Akban
In the years that passed since the founding of the Akban traditional MMA school we did countless training sessions in various terrains and weather situations. We did want to record, on video, a typical in-dojo training. On this very big website we have countless videos of martial art techniques we created and uploaded for our martial arts encyclopedia, we do not have many videos depicting a training session. We figured that the challenge is to capture both the silence, the beauty and the down-to-earth approach we have here, in Akban. Instead of boasting we chose to understate the randori, kata and all the other stuff. Did we do it well? The question of how to video accurately our martial art is a big one. Even though we love Bruce Lee we are quite sure day to day training doesn't look like a movie. Well, enough said, here it is.
Why do we need martial arts wiki in addition to wikipedia?
When looking at the academical part of the Akban project there is always the question: Why did we, Akban veterans, invest so much time and effort in building and maintaining a martial art wiki when there is an alternative, namely Wikipedia?
A recent Hebrew article in Akban's journal delves deeper into the reasons. Wikipedia deals with existing fields and articles. You can write a Wikipedia article only when the knowledge and facts about this article are already known. An author wishing to publish original academic work has to publish it in a scientific journal, not in the Wikipedia.
Apart from the Wikipedia focus on publishing existing textual and numerical data, Wikipedia has an unsolved problem with the copyright of non textual media types, a hurdle we solved by videoing and editing all the Akban-wiki techniques.
Martial arts research is either adjacent to physiology , psychology and anthropology or deals with comparative backgrounds in the emerging field of Hoplology. There is almost no Martial arts research that is endogenous and deals with the techniques as an investigated entities.
We are still in the beginning of this comparative research and so far we have little more then 1000 techniques from different disciplines in the Akban-wiki. A growing part of these techniques have textual and semantic data attached and more information is added in English and Hebrew weekly.
After several years of being online we are somewhat disappointed that no one has started a similar effort. That, for us, means the independent scientific investigation of martial arts is a niche subject. It also means that we will have to continue with this effort on the current pace. At this pace we will have 5000 videos of techniques that are articles, not how-to clips, only 6-7 years from now.
We are committed to lifelong training, committed to our community and committed in this endeavour.
Most of the discussion is going on on the Hebrew part of our site, but if you have insights or feedback we would love to hear from you, send us an e-mail.
New martial arts wiki
We have a new Martial Arts wiki today. Gone are the cumbersome wikipedia skins, css and boxes. Gone is the mutual navigation with the akban.org site.
On the helm was Keith Harris from Bifugi who did it with help from Vadim Gilead and me.
Since we are a small crew we overlooked many bugs in the new design. Any remarks, corrections and suggestions mailed to us would be warmly appreciated.
Why is the rate of news in English akban martial arts slowing?
Recent months have seen a less then average posting on the English part of this web site.
Diminishing writers' base made the decision inevitable; we now write less news in English, more in Hebrew. We continue to update the Hebrew Homepage almost every day and do our main thing: update and write new articles on our martial arts wiki, both in English and in Hebrew. עבור לדף הראשי בעברית התחל להתאמן באומנות לחימה
Here are some ways to stay connected with the Akban-project: Twitter in English - Akban Twitter in Hebrew - אקבן Google reader and iGoogle Friendfeed Akban Friendfeed video updates Netvibes akban page Akban Facebook page in English Facebook – אקבן אומנויות לחימה Akban videos on Youtube Akban RSS in English RSS עברית RSS of recent Akban-wiki updates Contact us either through akban@akban.org or 972-52-2723207
This web site by Bifugi, an Akban veterans venture
Akban martial arts on the web
There is no immediate cure for the gap between our growing user base and our small budget.
I guess that this means we will have to deal with periods of downtime due to peak demands. Since the non-existent business model behind our project is just "Serve our community" with no consumerism involved it'll probably stay this way.
Here are some links to Akban martial arts University on the www:
Akban YouTube channel - Hundreds of martial arts clips
Akban's Facebook page
Akban on Twitter
Server upgrade
Initially we weren't prepared for so many visitors, bandwidth and database functions - so last month we had several hours of downtime due to server overload.
We migrated servers to one lightly better. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Click here to add us to your technorati favourites:
Why don't we post more front page news?
This web site is very active, active in a web 1.0 kind of way. During the last months our extremely lean crew (recession and other problems has decimated the number of active people working on the Akban project by half) continued to write new articles and martial art techniques to the Akban-wiki. If you'll take a look at our recent wiki changes you'll notice a lot of garble if you do not have Hebrew installed on your computer - we're translating our initial data into Hebrew on the same database.
Our documenting abilities are a bit more sophisticated now - we document all the new krav maga techniques in HD video.
New Martial arts' videos portal!
We just uploaded a beta of your Martial arts videos portal, and are pretty happy with it.
Till now, in order to find a movie of a martial art technique the viewer had to know the name of the technique, search the technique in the Akban-wiki and only then view the technique inside the relevant martial arts encyclopedia article.
A few months ago we paused almost all the documentation of new techniques in video and text. We wanted to make using our website an easier experience. The new video page is the result of this work. All the videos in it and most of the videos on our site were filmed by us with a small group of Akban veterans and an even smaller group of martial arts instructors from various martial arts. We store the videos on YouTube to save on broadband fees.
Economizing is one of our themes as this web site is not money oriented and the ads on it just make part of our fees sustainable. This underlying structure has made the instructors that agreed that their techniques be videoed, posted, debated and sometimes substituted by a better technique a rare breed of people.
We salute this small group of veterans and martial arts instructors. Next month we'll start adding short biographies in English, we already have a biographies in Hebrew.
So, please go ahead, try the new martial arts video page and if you have any comments or suggestions we'll be happy if you add these here or on our martial arts forum.
Koto ryu, almost complete video and kata are online
We are getting nearer to a complete coverage of all the Koto ryu kata in your martial arts encyclopedia.
Thanks for all the guys pitching in, it shows what dedication, martial expertise and our veterans can achieve. link to Koto Ryu kata and techniques
Server downtime of Akban.org martial arts website fixed
Due to server downtime our website was down for a few hours, our apologies. A trusted team of top Akban-Bifugi experts with our hosts' team spent a nerve wrecking time trying to solve the puzzle and run an FSCK - File System Check. Thanks to Matt Guza we finally went online.
