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.