Just one of the most cool applications of CreativeCommons up to now.
Basically, it's a travelguide built by users under a CC license.
I explored it a while ago, but never actually subscribed till today. And it's really really cool:
beyond defining your travel map, you can add/edit places, sections... not so different from a wiki, ok, but it's got a wierd charm. Maybe it's just wanderlust knockin' at the door ;)
Suw wrote a few days ago a very very very interesting piece about CreativeCommons and, more in general, to the concept of copyright vs copyleft issue in this small connected world.
That made me think a lot, and realizing that I often get stuck in considerations about free_as_in_beer vs. free_as_in_speech issues, while there are other maybe steps to be taken even before that.
And that reminds me also that I should be translating the CC.com pages for the CreativeCommons.it site :)
A must read (or a must hear?!? I cannot wait to listen Cory uttering the "arrr"s you find in the text
Some Creative Commons related news today.
First of all, the CC Search Plugins:
Earlier today Steve Griffin announced a CC Search Sidebar for Mozilla-Based Browsers. Previously Steve has worked on a C# API for CC metadata.
A mycroft search plugin for the CC search engine is also available.
The mycroft plugin adds a new search engine to those available from the Mozilla Firefox toolbar.
More news on this subject comes from flickr, that added CC licenses to their license options. Way to go!!!
If only DeviantArt would do the same...
Last CC related news: today I received my signed copy of The Future of Ideas :)
Can't wait to dive into it!
Nathan Yergler
We have a long-standing specification for embedding licenses in MP3 audio files which requires two pieces of information: a license claim embeddded in the audio file, and verification metadata hosted on a web page. While command-line tools for looking up the verification metadata have been available for a while, we have lacked an easy, drag and drop solution for examining an embedded claim and whether or not it verifies. No more.
Link found on Joi's blog
A couple of days ago I posted on the other blog that I was having fun in helping two fellow bloggers in publishing their work under a Creative Commons license (and learning how to do that in the meanwhile ;) ).
So, here they are:
. Onino's thesis
. Zuppah's poetry
Both of them are in Italian.
For the month of March, two artists in a long-distance relationship are going to put all their electronic communication online. Phone conversations, emails, IMs, camera phone pics, the lot, it’ll all be online under a Creative Commons licence. IN Network, the performance is called.On one side, as Jill writes, this is quite shocking. You see reservation numbers and the like, and there's an instinctive reaction like “don't do that”. On the other side, I realize that most of our communication is already public, at least to some degree... so much so that I'm slowly “letting go” the grip on “privacy at all costs”. Moreover, I was thinking how this initiative acted, at least inside my brain, as a confidence counterbalance to episodes like Paris Hilton's mobile public hack that happened a few days ago: after all, if there's people willing to just give away all their communication intimacy like that, the publishing of one's own addressbook couldn't be such a big deal...
So finally I produced my first podcast.
It took a few steps to get me here:
1. listening to Joi speaking about CreativeCommons and getting interested into it once again
2. find the time and will to study how enclosures work with RSS2
3. create something worth to be published in audio format
I already blogged about the first point, and setting up CodeWitch for enclosures in the end was just a matter of downloading and installing the MTEnclosures plugin, plus a little template tweaking.
About step 3, I decided to take some CC licensed stuff and create a derivative work of it. So I chose a beautiful short story (in Italian) by kirjava, read it aloud, and mixed it with a song I found a while ago through the CC search engine. The quality of the recording is quite poor at the moment (I used the internal mic of my laptop), but it's more than enough for a proof of concept. The resulting work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, as required by its components, and available here for download.
If you are using a podcast enable newsreader (such as ipodder), you should also see the attachment to the feed.
Yet another interesting mid-August story.
This article appeared a few days ago on boing boing about Wikipedia being (ab)used by BBC to spread information about a forthcoming online alternate reality game.
Now the discussion is almost over, but the boingboing conversation is in my opinion a must read.
You can also be interested in the original post on Wikipedia and the actual one (after the Wikipedians review process).
Here's also BBC's official response.
Now, stepping aside from ethical considerations, I find this extremely interesting (and actually brilliant to some extent).
On one side, this is yet another proof of how wikipedia is now being valued as authoritative by public opinion (at least by the portion that actually uses it); on the other side, this whole ado had the effect of bringing some extra attention to the BBC show (Wilde docet) while making clear how foolproof Wikipedia is, since it auto-corrected (meaning it expelled the factious bits) in such a short time.
Of course the problem of information spamming and viral marketing exploits exists in the read-write web, but what I'm trying to point out is that this is the place where that kind of stuff can be patched for, while on mainstream media it simply hides between the lines, soon becoming history and poisoning information for the time being.
Update:: for what's worth, this is entry #600 of All Things Bru :)
So we are almost there.
Next week now I'll be discussing my thesis and hopefully get my degree in computer science at the UPO.
Main resource for writing it has been wikipedia. It, together with various blogs, has been the only source of enough coherent information about magmatics and fluid topics as web 2.0, semantic web, research in fields like virtual teams, emergence and user interfaces.
As for the document itself, it's coming out much less glamorous than I thought, and my mind on that is that it's such a huge and rich argument (title going to be: A Web Wide World: (lower case) semantic applications for virtual teams) that much of its beauty comes out from sheer complexity, and trying to render it out of its natural hypertextual context will inevitably ruin most of it (unless of course you're a natural born writer, which I'm not).
Anyway, I'm carefully keeping track of all the wikipedia articles I'm pillaging to complete the writing, since I plan to give them back (translated) to the Italian wiki. I think this could be a nice deal to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Sitting in the backrow at the Ward Cunningham keynote (Design Principles of Wiki: How can so little do so much?) here at WikySym/HyperText and using the macbook to redistribute connection over to the whole audience I feel like I'm living closer to the principles of wiki culture :D
I created this to support a new way of ranting about computer programming -Ward Cunningham
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Just Bru in the Creative Commons category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
Cognitive Science is the previous category.
Digital Art is the next category.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
