Way of the Wikipedia, Part 1

Just got home from an exhausting recording session in Baltimore, but i wanted to post this before i crash for the evening: H now stands for Hugh Sung in the Wikipedia!

For those of you who might not be familiar, www.Wikipedia.org is one of the largest (if not the largest) online encyclopedias on the internet that anyone can contribute to. That being said, one cannot simply write up self-promoting articles and expect them to be left in the Wikipedia repository willy-nilly - that lesson was learned the hard way by yours truly! With the open-source medium comes an amazing crack team of administrative editors and correction "bots" that are virtually instantaneous in their oversight of anything that enters the Wikipedia domain - in fact, if i recall this correctly, approximately 5,000 articles actually get deleted from the Wikipedia each day because of inappropriate or uncompliant content.

I'll get more into the tale of my Wikipedia journey when i'm less starved for sleep, but for now let me extend warm thanks to wiki-admins GoodDamon, Timotab, and especially ArielGold for their patience with me as i stumbled around in wiki-newness!

InstantEncore.com - a New Classical Music Portal

A dear friend of mine from Curtis - Margo Drakos, cellist with the San Diego Symphony and faculty member of the Manhattan School of Music - has been busy launching an exciting new Classical Music site called InstantEncore.com with high ambitions to become THE portal for artists, audiences, and presenters - sort of the YouTube of Classical Music, according to venture capitalist William Stensrud. The site is young, but already there's an impressive roster of top artists in the field with recordings and podcasts available for download. Videos will be forthcoming soon, and you may very well start seeing episodes of Music Meets Tech there (at least, that would be neat, wouldn't it?) One really cool feature that seems to be built into the site is the ability to create your own custom 'home page' where you can keep track of your favorite artists' concert schedule, recording activities, and the like.

Here's the 'official' blurb about InstantEncore.com from Margo, but please don't take my word for it - visit the site for yourself and have a peek at the future of Classical Music marketing!

InstantEncore.com is the new digital classical music community designed to provide audiences with the resources to easily find and enjoy live classical music anywhere and anytime. InstantEncore.com makes it simple for visitors to find concert information, download music, enjoy concert video and audio streaming, and access Podcasts and pre-concert talks. Customers can customize their homepage to follow their favorite cities, venues, artists, ensembles, conductors, and composers and sign up for Inside Scoop: email alerts about new digital content from their favorites. There is no subscription fee to login and enjoy InstantEncore. For audience members, a special bonus: an Instant Encore! Take the concert home with you for free ~ Organizations may provide their concertgoers with a unique card entering your hall that allows the audience member to download the concert they attended for free! For organizations, this provides a special opportunity to obtain meaningful corporate sponsorship. A corporate sponsor logo is featured on the download card and a click-through advertisement is positioned next to the concert event listing and in the digital music store. InstantEncore.com a digital destination designed to keep the audience of today while creating the audience of tomorrow!

SPECIFICS FOR ORGANIZATIONS:

1) Increase your Ticket Sales! Add more value to your concert seats with a complimentary digital download of a concert

2) Corporate Sponsorship Opportunities: Offer valuable advertising opportunities to corporations through our services

3) Personal Thank-You Gifts to Friends! Design digital download packages of your music for donors, friends, special events and as part of education outreach

4) Expand your Brand: locally, nationally, and around the world!

The Power of the "OFF" Button

i mentioned previously the painful amputation of the unlimited data plan for my Samsung i730 PDA Phone, as well as the new household rule of turning off stuff (mainly my computers) when they're not in use. The sudden lack of instant internet access anywhere, anytime has resulted in some strange side effects - most notably, peace of mind and a better focus during work.

David Allen in his "Getting Things Done" principles talks about how emptying the mind - mental "RAM", if you will - results in significantly less stress and better productivity. i never noticed how non-stop my mental engine had been running until i started setting up the new "off button" boundaries. Having computers on 24/7 keeps you constantly connected, constantly wondering about that next email, never able to completely "shut off" thoughts about work, communication, to-do's, projects, the list goes on and on. i never realized how glazed my focus had always been when my kids clamored for attention or my mother-in-law called me repeatedly to come down for dinner or my wife was mentioning things that happened to her at work. Instant, ubiquitous access to information in many ways made me a slave to the almighty connection; a data-addict if you will, never more than a few seconds away from checking emails or browsing my RSS feeds.

With the introduction of the "off" button has come the inclusion of a strange new word into my vocabulary: "NO."

"NO, i don't need to check for that next email."

"NO, all that paperwork can wait until later."

"NO, i don't need to waste three hours browsing and surfing - it's more fun playing 'Clue' with the kids."

I'm beginning to like this new life of computers that are "off" - and, boy, i never realized how loud the CPU fan gets at night!

Technorati : Hugh, Hugh Sung, Sung, family, hugh sung, off, off button, www.hughsung.com, www.hughsung.com/blog

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