Fiamma Fumana Official WebSite

Fiamma Fumana’s blog is moving. We started in late 2005 with a band blog, and in the early times Jessica posted often. Then she understood blogging is not really her thing, and I was left the only one posting. Meanwhile, in spring 2007 I started to keep a second blog about my activities as economist. Since those concern music and the creative industries, more and more often I would find myself wondering where I should post stuff that would legitimately belong in either one. With 2008 I decided to integrate them, bringing them under the same roof in my personal website. I think that a reader interested in public policy towards creativity and regional development might find in the “music” posts some first-hand experience of living within the creative industries: and that Fiamma Fumana fans might read with some interest my economist’s thoughts about the environment in which the band develops. Anyway you can get rid of the economic posts with a click.

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

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.

Davide Ferrario and Andrea Zambelli, producer and director of “Mondine - From mother to daughter” (the documentary about Mondine di Novi and Fiamma Fumana. I write about this here and here) have decided to move the film premiere from the spring to the Fall 2008. And for a very good reason: there is a lot of very high quality footage, they need extra time to edit it and make a wonderful film, that will make people laugh and cry. So we decided to reform and relaunch the project’s blog: also, we will do several things with the Novi choir from here to the Fall. We have a new domain (mondine.it) and a new group, with my old friend Valeria Carletti as the main blogger and a more recent friend, Freddy Mascheretti, to take care of the relevant technology. We have a guru too, Luca “Vanz” Vanzella of Daimon and Maestrini per caso: he has been so kind as to give us some good advice over dinner (Eritrean restaurant), but of course he bears no responsibility over our modest, utterly unprofessional blogging efforts. And good luck to us! You can find the new blog here./

This man is Ricardo Franco Levi, the internet communication genius who had the idea to draft a bill to regulate blogs that no one feels the need for. Typical: Chris Anderson showed that the world is a better place when physical bottlenecks to diversity (of information, in this case) are removed, Ricardo Franco Levi replaces them with regulatory bottlenecks and we are back were we started. This is bad policy, arrogant and ignorant, and will not be tolerated. Please, would everyone sign the petition to kill the bill that would take independent blogs away from us. This has nothing to do with FF, but I just felt I had to blog it.