Turns out that “The Orchard Music” which is owned by Sony, claims that the very last note and the applause from our performance is stolen from a recording they represent. And it’s not even the same note. Mine ends on an F and theirs ends on an A-flat. Ah, but they are both notes on a piano. Just joking.

Well obviously this is a match made by some kind of automated process, but it’s grossly weird 1. that applause would even match; and 2. that it depends on The Orchard Music now to release their claim. Meanwhile it is assumed that they do in fact own that section of my recording, and they can monetize (put ads on) my original recording.

You know what’s even funnier. I just listened to their recording on YouTube. And now it shows that in its entire history it has had one single play. Meaning that I am the only person who has ever played their YouTube segment. In the full year that it’s been on YouTube.

(Outcome: “The Orchard Music” released their claim on July 18th, just over two weeks after it was made.)

Here’s the performance I’m talking about, In case you want to hear my entire recording…

The post Copyright Dispute Humor appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I’m hearing some improvement. Particularly learning where the notes are on the fingerboard. And learning to press all those fingers down and keep them down. Learning legato playing. Able to get the bow positioned better, but not perfect yet.

The most important thing from my third lesson was learning that I really have to press that bow against the strings as if I meant it. This gives a much better tone. (I keep forgetting.) Much better tone. And you’ll see those little silver strips across the fingerboard up near my hand — they’re there to remind me exactly where to put the fingers down to get the right pitches. (And there’s a little felt piece on the back of the cello neck where my thumb has to go.) It’s easy to forget, but when I do remember, I can actually sometimes his the right note the first time.

Ummm, did I say that the reason I’m learning cello is to understand what the string players have to do in order to play my compositions? Gaining empathy for sure.

The post Cello After Two Weeks appeared first on Sky's Blog.

One is this idea that I have to change hand position to a new string to play more notes. I’m used to being able to slide my hands left or right on the keyboard with the notes just kind of laid out one after another. The idea that they might be side-by-side — more like “overlapping” — is challenging. Not phased too much by having to do different things with left hand and right hand — that’s something we also learn in piano 101. Though I’ve never played a guitar, I can imagine that it would be way easier to “hit the right note” if there were frets on the fingerboard. The cello is truly a challenge in terms of intonation. There’s nothing telling me in advance I’m going to put my fingers in exactly the right spot to hit that desired note. I hear it “after” I make my selection of position. Yikes!

I made a short recording improvising on the cello, in Logic Pro (think GarageBand) and then threw it away. I’ll document that kind of thing later on. It was truly terrible.

The post Cello After One Week appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I find that taking a stab at new things that are really complex, is sometimes fun for me. Gives me enough experience that I understand the basics about some new activity or subject. Does not get me into a rut, so I can still think in creative ways about using a half-baked skill I’ve acquired.

In composition this sometimes becomes for me a fascination with chromaticism (as opposed to tonicity), which may leave a piece of music sounding less “finished” to the classical ear.

So what’s new now? I decided a few weeks ago that I want to understand better what the musicians are thinking when they read and play my music. And since I worked on string parts so much during 2016, I decided to learn to play the cello. Jason O’Connell, who is quite accomplished on viola, convinced me that it would require fewer wrist contortions than violin or viola. Convinced me. And it sounds so good!

I went to some concerts. I listened to some recordings. I sat through (in the audience) a master class. Daunting, because clearly it’s not the easiest instrument to master.

Jason suggested I take lessons from Eugenio Solinas, who just completed a PSD at SFCM this year. I was able to convince him to add me as an “older” student while I work really hard to learn the basics. I’m committed to doing this long enough to really value the experience, not necessarily to become a great player. On the other hand, it would be a real kick to be able to record some of my own compositions. And as the composer, I can make the compositions as simple or complex as I want to.

The week after SFCM classes ended, I took my first lesson. Woo hoo! Off we go.

My video (above) was made the day I obtained my rented cello and before I was taught any technique at all, and I had been playing around for a few minutes first. My first actual lesson was the next day. I’ll report on how it goes.

The post And now for Something Completely Different appeared first on Sky's Blog.

[vimeo 6827318]

* Understand risk. Buy low, sell high. Manage your risk.

* Spend your time (as in investor) on the companies that are doing well, don’t just “nickel and dime” the ones that are failing.

* The cost of failure is decreasing. If you start from open source, and have a designer, an engineer, a products guy, users, and you get growing 30% a month or so, you don’t even need to write a business plan. [just after 9:00 minutes into the video – THIS IS THE KEY point I want to make]. If you can get your project to the point where it is running, growing, perhaps bringing in some money, you bring in the VC investors at that point – no earlier!

* Open standards give you a big advantage. Big companies spend $ millions to even think about a new project, but you can get your project off the ground for far less by starting with open source, good ideas and good thinking.

* Development methodology needs to be flexible, iterative, and respond to what you can learn from your customers. ”If you’ve launched your product and you’re not embarrassed by it, you‘ve launched too late.”

* Distribution. Every failed startup has had a business model, team, and so forth, but no users. Almost every team that has users eventually comes up with a business model [if they’re smart and paying attention]. You must be viral – you must infect your customers.

The post Joi Ito on Innovation and Startups appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Chris started by saying “I don’t have an agenda; I don’t have an announcement…” referring, of course, to the number of companies that had been making announcements on the stage. Probably not unusual, since you want to make product announcements where they will be heard, but it was certainly being noticed this time around.

The full video of Chris’ talk appears at the bottom of this article. I’m going to pick and choose from the points that Matt jotted down.

So, what is the essence of community? Community…

[Chris says] Community… lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, likes, dislikes and the people we link up with;

Sky sez: Community is a construct composed of our connections and interactions — to that extent, wherever we go we bring those connections with us. Because we are becoming highly-linked through electronic media (and social media), our communities may in fact be available to us almost everywhere we go! Communities of interest and Communities of practice are examples of these kinds of virtual communities (unlike our neighborhood, which is a physical community). We all participate in many communities, sometimes interacting in a number of them at the same time.

… is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks;

I have already made a comment on this (prior to hearing Chris), in remarking that bloggers are beginning to spread out beyond blogging and take their communities with them into Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. But, of course you’ve noticed that too. You probably started tweeting a long time ago, added a Facebook or Linked-in profile, and put more of your photos on Facebook now than on your old photo-sharing site. So if it’s true that 25% of Web traffic is to Facebook^[2][3], then this certainly means that some of the social behavior that motivated blogging has moved, with many of us, to Facebook.

… is a commodity, but people [themselves] aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special;

I’ve been promoting this idea for years—and I still have to remind clients that they can set up an online community web site, but they still need people to staff it, and they still need customers’ voices to make it really happen. And when you inject people into the equation, it forces things to scale more linearly and it costs more for upkeep and maintenance of the human community members.

… cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”;

That’s the essence, isn’t it? You have to listen to what your friends, community, customers, are saying. I’m reading Peter Block now, and he’s one of the masters of using transformational change to solve community issues. [Photo is from peterblock.com.]

… is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbour;

About a year ago someone asked me whether The Dalai Lama Foundation wasn’t just “a big web site with a small organization…” At first the question offended me, but that didn’t last long as I realized and even pointed out that the organization in fact did do much of its work online. So it is indeed a large web site with a (smaller human) organization behind it. The organization was and is distributed geographically. It uses network communications to get people going and then local groups of people may begin working on their own. There is little planned organization of this process, and it grows entirely organically.

… grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons;

Leaders arise organically from within communities. Leaders arise when a cause needs someone to carry it forward. At the Foundation we have had six years of growing in response to leaders who arise organically and naturally from our communities. This is reflected in the many projects that the Foundation has incubated or supported. This leaves the central organization small, but promotes the growth of new organizations that respond to the immediate needs of the constituent communities.]

… is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream;

Yes, community is looking outward to see and to listen to what those in the community want. And that’s why leaders develop and grow organically within healthy communities.

… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.

Focus on these points: 1) look for people who share your needs, desires and motivations; 2) connect with them; 3) expand that connection by listening to the needs of those in the communities you form or join; 4) help foster organic growth of leaders within your communities; 5) continue looking outward at all times!

[swfobj src=”http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2752312″ width=”480″ height=”386″ flashvars=”autoplay=false” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”true”]

[2] Could 25% of page-views on the Web really be attributed to Facebook? Drake Direct says so. Their source for the stats is compete.com, which uses a sampling methodology (they have a sample set of people who “represent” the Internet user population) and projects their results to a large population (all Web users). They are not directly measuring real traffic to any web site—they are estimating. I have done statistical work of this sort, and for certain kinds of probability distributions it is problematic…particularly long-tail distributions. So don’t believe the 25% statistic, but do believe that traffic to Facebook really is quite high!

[3] Remember not to confuse the Web with the Internet. It is only a subset of overall traffic on the net. Email probably still accounts for far more traffic than web pages, and video is coming into its own rapidly.

The post Chris Pirillo’s “Pillars of Community” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Since there are hardly any phone booths anymore, she had turned her Mac into a phone booth!

The post Phonebooth 2.0 appeared first on Sky's Blog.

David Spark is a new media producer and consultant whose output includes Spark Minute, and he blogs at SparkMinute.com.

[The photo at left was taken at LeWeb in Paris, 2009, by Rodrigo Sepúlveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

You can check David’s Cool and Not-so-Cool post, but in the video, to save time, I edited to focus on the cool!

The post Backstage Pass- David Spark appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Ewan blogs at EwanSpence.com. He’s a blogger, author and writer based in Edinborough, Scotland.

[The photo at left was taken at LeWeb in Paris, 2009, by Rodrigo Sepúlveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

The post Backstage Pass- Ewan Spence appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Eliane is cofounder of Ubergizmo. She was a co-organizer of the Traveling Geeks tour to Paris and LeWeb, 2009.

[The photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepúlveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

The post Backstage Pass- Eliane Fiolet appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Frederic blogs at ReadWriteWeb.

[The photo at left was provided by Frederic Lardinois.]

The post Backstage Pass- Frederic Lardinois appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Beth comes from the application-development world, founded TechMamas.com and tweets as @techmama.

[The photo at left is by Olivier Ezratty.]

The post Backstage Pass- Beth Blecherman appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Robin writes at TechCrunch and is the managing editor of virtualization.com. He lives in Brussels.

[The photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa.]

The post Backstage Pass- Robin Wauters appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Olivier blogs at Opinions Libres. His photos appear in the Flickr group for the Traveling Geeks. He along with Eliane Fiolet (who was a co-organizer of the Paris trip) was one of our local navigators).

[The photo at left is by Rodrigo Sepulveda-Schulz (CC)by-nc-sa, one of the Traveling Geeks Paris geeks. Yes, that’s the lens on Olivier’s camera.]

The post Backstage Pass- Olivier Ezratty appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Matthew writes at MatthewBuckland.com. His favorite color is red.

[The photo at left was provided by Matt Buckland.]

The post Backstage Pass- Matthew Buckland appeared first on Sky's Blog.