Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words. Words. Words.
- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii
I’m not normally prone to quoting Shakespeare – more of a Modernist and Americanist by (academic) training and by inclination. But a few blog memes this weekend have me thinking of Hamlet and his antic disposition, and the potential for words to be meaningless.
(via Lessig Blog) comes notice that Barack Obama’s campaign posted this notice encouraging the DNC to license all Democratic presidential debates under a creative commons license:
I am writing in strong support of a letter from a bipartisan coalition of academics, bloggers and Internet activists recently addressed to you and the Democratic National Committee. The letter asks that the video from any Democratic Presidential debate be available freely after the debate, by either placing the video in the public domain, or licensing it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license.
Since then it seems Edwards has joined in as well:
. . . I am asking each news network to make video footage from the presidential debates that they broadcast available on the internet for the public to view and use responsibly. I am also asking Chairman Dean, who is playing a valuable role in organizing many of the Democratic primary debates, to use his influence with the networks to make the debates more broadly available.
The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks’ rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license.
Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse.
Hopefully the debates themselves will be worth all the fuss about making them available – if it is the same old sound bytes having them under a CC license won’t be terribly helpful.
(Via Lawrence Lessig)
Sony’s new competitor to YouTube, eyeVio, will license content users upload under a Creative Commons Attribution license by default.
Lessig points to this article from Digital Trends as the source of this bit of info.
I wish Flickr would do this. Flickr already allows you to set, as an individual user, your preferences for uploaded images to default to a specific license, including several creative commons licenses, – but the global default is still “all rights reserved.”
David Armano points on Logic + Emotion to Alain Thys‘ “I Am The Media,” a presentation given at the Marketing3 conference in the Netherlands back in November 2006.
The presentation itself is available under a creative commons license via Slideshare – if you actually download the ppt file from there, you can view the notes on many of the slides as well – or it also embedded below.
It’s a compelling presentation, well designed, connecting the power of brands (and consumer’s emotional connections to them) with the rise of consumer-generated media:
Read more…
David Sifry from Technorati has posted the latest State of the Blogosphere – except that now it is the “State of the Live Web.”
He notes that, in a change from the old State of the Blogosphere reports:
With this report, we expand on this tradition by introducing information and analysis relating to the broader range of social media on the Web — what we and many others call the Live Web (another good definition). Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.
It’s odd to me that the links for “Live Web” actually point to Linux Journal – I’d always though of “Live” as a kind of Microsoftism – to go with Windows Live Search, Live Spaces, Office Live, etc.
(According to Doc Searls, the “World Live Web” meme goes back to 2001 and was coined by Allen Searls – I know Doc has been using this distinction between Live web and Static web for some time.)
Anyway, some conclusions:
