The official forum for all things Joe Bonamassa, guitars and blues music
You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Joe Bonamassa Forum → General Topics → Blues Masters Finalists - Did My Entry Even Get Reviewed?
Damien, it's a shame that this is the topic that brought you to this Forum. I hope you get some kind of satisfaction eventually. But you are obviously a super nice guy so I really hope that you will stick around here and enjoy the fun being amongst Joe's biggest fans!
Very nice playing Damian. One thing I really like is that you seemed to have a plan. IOW, you thought out what you were going to play and still left room for improvisation. One thing I have noticed consistently while watching some of the videos is that players would tend to run out of steam about 2 min in.
Thanks Padank, I really appreciate it. You're a 100% correct, I did have a plan. I personally felt that almost all of the backing tracks were WAY too long. There's no way I felt comfortable soloing for 7+ minutes on the Ballad Of John Henry. At 3 minutes, Lonesome Road made the most sense. First of all, it already had that built in "Crossroads-ish" riff by Joe. I tried add my own little memorable bit at the beginning and in the middle. That left me with roughly 90 seconds to improvise, which I thought was more than enough.
I didn't mention this before, but I guess the other reason this whole Yoov.io thing bothers me so much is that I remember the conditions under which I made my entry. My wife and I got news that her father's cancer had taken a turn for the worst, so we had to fly across the country to be with him in his final days. So the day we got the news and the night before we left, I recorded my entry in the early morning because I knew we weren't going to be returning back home anytime soon. So with that effort to make an entry (and obviously a heavy heart), and if my entry wasn't even reviewed, well, you can imagine how I probably feel.
Damien, it's a shame that this is the topic that brought you to this Forum. I hope you get some kind of satisfaction eventually. But you are obviously a super nice guy so I really hope that you will stick around here and enjoy the fun being amongst Joe's biggest fans!
Thank you Sally. Honestly, I came to this forum because I didn't feel like I had anywhere else to go with this since Yoov.io never responded. But everyone here has been incredible kind and supportive and I do appreciate that very much. Yes, I plan on sticking around, you guys are great 
I've never met Joe, but in all of the years I've followed him he seems like an incredibly nice person. I'll never forget the first time I heard of him was actually not him playing guitar, but he was featured on the local news. They did a story on him where he came to a local school with his acoustic guitar and played blues for kids, and I thought that was awesome and generous of him considering he toured like a madman.
Back when I played in a band, I loved using music altruistically and helping other people. Here's a something I did many years ago:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2 … 32,1728465
I feel like if Joe knew that something like this happened in a contest which he endorsed, he would at the very least take a look at my situation and make sure that it would never happen again to someone else.
Just got a chance to read through your story and hope you get some answers. As for your playing on the video I am very impressed and one very nice job of guitar playing. Killer tone and killer licks. Had looked over the finalists and wasn't what I expected. Had seen a few good ones and yours is right up there with them. I can never figure out how they judge these things anyway. You are a winner with the effort you did for the bus driver and his son. Years from now that will be something you'll remember a lot more than a contest and make you feel good inside. We all should strive to be like that more often. You are definitely a winner.
Really nice job there, Damien. Given the problem that you had, I found it interesting how I couldn't see the video at all on the ipad (where I usually have no problem), but I could on the laptop.
Just got a chance to read through your story and hope you get some answers. As for your playing on the video I am very impressed and one very nice job of guitar playing. Killer tone and killer licks. Had looked over the finalists and wasn't what I expected. Had seen a few good ones and yours is right up there with them. I can never figure out how they judge these things anyway. You are a winner with the effort you did for the bus driver and his son. Years from now that will be something you'll remember a lot more than a contest and make you feel good inside. We all should strive to be like that more often. You are definitely a winner.
Thanks for the kind words Tim, I really appreciate it.
don't know if they will reply but I made a comment on Guitar center's facebook page under the post they made about the finalists. I noted that yoov.io was unresponsive and some entrants experienced technical issues which were not addressed during the contest, and that maybe they should fix it for their next one. I'll let you know if they reply
Thanks, Jane! That was really thoughtful of you to do that. I'm starting to just kind of accept how this all went down, I guess it is what it is.
Really nice job there, Damien. Given the problem that you had, I found it interesting how I couldn't see the video at all on the ipad (where I usually have no problem), but I could on the laptop.
Thanks for the kinds words nmagcorn! That's interesting it wouldn't play on your Ipad. At least on my end, I didn't have that problem. When I uploaded the vid to YT, I did select the option to make it playable on mobile devices.
nmagcorn wrote:Really nice job there, Damien. Given the problem that you had, I found it interesting how I couldn't see the video at all on the ipad (where I usually have no problem), but I could on the laptop.
Thanks for the kinds words nmagcorn! That's interesting it wouldn't play on your Ipad. At least on my end, I didn't have that problem. When I uploaded the vid to YT, I did select the option to make it playable on mobile devices.
Unfortunately, The yoovio platform does not work on mobile devices. Hopefully they will add this feature for future contests.
Damian,
I work in IT...specifically which these types or web applications that utilize social media and from what I could tell, Yoovio is a very poorly designed system. The way they utilized sharing was a complete mess and large parts of the system were flash based (why it doesn't play on iPad or any iOS device for that matter) without having an html5 option. Their marketing team came up with this fancy language for the rules:
Yoov.io platform will track Entrant's online popularity using a proprietary ranking algorithm ("online popularity") on Entrant's registered Social Media Platforms that are connected to Entrant's Yoov.io account.
However, their system does nothing more then count the number of times a video is played (called from their server really) and increases a count. First off... that is not an algorithm. Second, it's a false claim to say it measures the online popularity of connected social media when it actually doesn't do anything of the sort. As we all found out, the only thing that counted was the number of times the video was played from either facebook, their site, or their wonky links from the share. Youtube plays did not count. I don't even want to get into the security issues with their platform. I deal with clients who have literally millions of facebook fans and they don't see that type of engagement on their contests. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who were in the top 100 for points played their video over an over again. They probably have IP logs that can show it, but nobody is going to comb through 10's of thousands of lines to make sure.
As bad as Yoovi.io is, it was Guitar Center that chose to use this platform (likely a budget consideration) instead of going with something that would insure the contest would be fair. In many of these situations, it's tough to tell how bad a system really is until it's too late to reverse course but if you're putting 10 grand on the line, you'd think they'd do it right. It looks like the company that runs this is: http://revimage.com/index.php
Damian,
I work in IT...specifically which these types or web applications that utilize social media and from what I could tell, Yoovio is a very poorly designed system. The way they utilized sharing was a complete mess and large parts of the system were flash based (why it doesn't play on iPad or any iOS device for that matter) without having an html5 option. Their marketing team came up with this fancy language for the rules:
Yoov.io platform will track Entrant's online popularity using a proprietary ranking algorithm ("online popularity") on Entrant's registered Social Media Platforms that are connected to Entrant's Yoov.io account.
However, their system does nothing more then count the number of times a video is played (called from their server really) and increases a count. First off... that is not an algorithm. Second, it's a false claim to say it measures the online popularity of connected social media when it actually doesn't do anything of the sort. As we all found out, the only thing that counted was the number of times the video was played from either facebook, their site, or their wonky links from the share. Youtube plays did not count. I don't even want to get into the security issues with their platform. I deal with clients who have literally millions of facebook fans and they don't see that type of engagement on their contests. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who were in the top 100 for points played their video over an over again. They probably have IP logs that can show it, but nobody is going to comb through 10's of thousands of lines to make sure.
As bad as Yoovi.io is, it was Guitar Center that chose to use this platform (likely a budget consideration) instead of going with something that would insure the contest would be fair. In many of these situations, it's tough to tell how bad a system really is until it's too late to reverse course but if you're putting 10 grand on the line, you'd think they'd do it right. It looks like the company that runs this is: http://revimage.com/index.php
Nathan, that's some hard hitting analysis. Thank you for taking the time to share your insight. I agree that using an new, relatively unproven company for a contest like this was likely a budget consideration. When you look at the prize list (and it's a really impressive prize list), they're giving out like 10's of thousands of dollars worth of gear, so I guess they had to cut costs somewhere. Problem is, yoov.io was responsible for perhaps the most critical part of the competition, and if your analysis is accurate, then they were basically trying to operate a Ferrari with a lawn mower engine 
And if yoov.io didn't count the response I got off youtube (which has to be the case since I had 50 points), then I was dead in the water a long time ago Anyway, I still enjoyed participating in the competition, it was good fun.
Joe Bonamassa Forum → General Topics → Blues Masters Finalists - Did My Entry Even Get Reviewed?
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.
Currently installed 2 official extensions. Copyright © 2003–2009 PunBB.