I imported all 301 posts from this blog onto the new one, and kept accounts for Jessica and other FF members, should they want to post. This site will still exist and be updated in its static pages, while new posts will appear on the new blog only.

Go to the new Fiamma Fumana blog

I happened to write a message in dialect on my Facebook wall, much to the puzzlement of my friend Luca Galli. He would be even more puzzled to read Wikipedia in Emiliano-Romagnolo! There are pages in the Bologna, Modena, Reggio Emilia, Ferrara, Parma, Piacenza, Carrara and Romagna dialects.

According to the List of Wikipedias this version ranks 156th by name of articles: 528, written by 177 users. It comes after the Oriya and before the one in Tahitian. The most popular Italian dialect on Wikipedia is the Lombard one, with 13.569 articles written by 419 users (that’s an average of more than 30 articles per user! Lombards have reputation for being industrious, but this is ridiculuous. Some NGO funded by the Northern League must be using public money here - not in an entirely wasteful way, for once). The Lombard Wikipedia has more articles than the Irish and Latvian ones (both are official languages of the European Union): it ranks 64th, after the Macedonian and before the Sundanese.

I like dialect, and I am very happy that a Wikipedia in Emiliano-Romagnolo exists. It would be nice to write some more articles, to get to 1000 by the end of the year! It would also be a good idea to keep an eye on the English articles regarding Italian dialects. In fact, I just edited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano-Romagnolo#Usage which claimed that Italian politicians discouraged the use of dialect as it was an obstacle to the integration of immigrants from southern Italy. That is not true, and has almost certainly been written by some Northern League zealot. Fellow citizens, Northern League supporters, dialect belongs to us all, not to any party. And, like all languages, it is there to reach out to others, not to exclude them. Listen to me, forget politics, and devote your energies to writing Wikipedia articles. Only five more to overtake Oriya and Wolof!:-)

In the last few years I got really interested in social web both as an economist and as a musician. My music experience - with the major role taken on by the web in the music industry - got me thinking pretty hard about how to use the Internet to communicate “many to many” rather than “one to many” as in the old times of mass media; these reflections, in turn, made me want to be a more active user of the web as a tool for my job as a musician. I gave a talk about this at the EBA Forum, as you can see in the video below. Here’s a summary of what we did:

• at the end of 2005 (just about to start recording Onda) we launched the first FF blog, the one on Blogger. Jessica and I got a taste for the kind of commitment that keeping a blog implies, though looking back on it we were blogging in a “1.0″ fashion, telling stories but not really trying to get readers involved in a conversation. In July 2007 we replaced our old website with the present “glorified blog” - which runs on a blogging platform, WordPress - and migrated the old blog here onto fiamma.org. Since then the new blog was visited more than 11.000 times and “narrowcasted” more than 37.000 pages. In these two years we wrote exactly 300 posts (this one not included) which spooled 469 comments.
• in may 2006 we opened a myspace band profile. We did not really know what to do with it, but everyone and their dog was doing it. That profile rounded up more than 10.000 visits with almost 8.000 song plays. Friends are 1.122. Above all, we found out that someone is indeed out there: when we tried to use our myspace identity as a tool to find someone to cooperate with a lot of people showed up. On Myspace I am here.
• onething that we did not do, it just sort of happened on its own is FF taking roots in Last.fm. “Scrobbles”, or plays, of FF music on Last.fm turn out to be just short of 10.000, about the same as my beloved Mouth Music or Cisco, much more than Italian folk royalty like Riccardo Tesi (2.115) or the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare (4.759), but much less than U2 (24.196.768). FF listeners on Last.fm are 1.183, enough to fill a very large theatre. Another nice feature of Last.fm is a radio sounding like Fiamma Fumana. In theory it should play artists “like” us; in practice it is based on tags eneterd by listeners ( (”electro folk”, “world”, “italy,”, “female vocals”…), so it starts of well with FF, FF, Varttina, Tesi, Mouth Music, Modena City Ramblers, then the “Italy” and “female vocals” tag kick in and it trails off towards improbable Italian female pop singers. If you are or plan to be Last.fm users, please visit our page and tag us sensibly… let’s save the radio. I am here on Last.fm.
• finally, I must mention the From mother to daughter blog, relaunched a few weeks ago after a false start… we will see.

C’è stato anche un bis (Ninnananna…), ma l’abbiamo suonato soltanto Gio, Cisco ed io, senza amplificazione, seduti sul bordo del palco, con la gente seduta sulla moquette ai nostri piedi e a luci accese. Il custode del teatro aveva acceso le luci di prepotenza, si vede che voleva andare a casa!

Grazie a tutti, ai ragazzi dei corsi di Booster (sul progetto Booster trovate più informazioni sul blog di The Hub), all’organizzazione, ai miei vecchi amici e splendidi quarantenni Gio e Cisco. Bella serata, bella esperienza, alla prossima.