commons
Opening the Social Graph
Lately the web has been buzzing with talk about the Social Graph (or Social Network Portability, as others prefer to call it).
The basic question? Who owns your social network, and how can you move it back and forth between different services and applications? (You should be the only one with complete control over your […]
Great copyright documentary: Good Copy Bad Copy
Good Copy Bad Copy (Denmark, 2007) is an amazing short documentary about copyright & remixing culture.
(Also, it features Yochai Benkler in a great video interview at Re:Publica 2007 Wizards of OS 4 (Thanks, Thomas!), which is so much less blurry more professionally produced than the snippets (1, 2, 3, 4) I shot with Thomas […]
Our UOC Second Life textbook: released under CC license
A few weeks ago, Max Senges, Thomas Praus and I got the chance to draft and write a summer university course about Second Life for the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, or Open University of Catalonia), a Barcelona-based university. Along with the course, of course, a textbook was needed.
Writing the book (”Virtual Worlds […]
Jamendo: Discover all kinds of music, free and legal (CC rules)
Sick of your ever-DRM-protected iTunes music? At Jamendo artists publish their music under a Creative Commons license, so you can enjoy, download and share it with your friends for free - and it’s all perfectly legal, too. Also, no more copy protection or other annoyances like you get in most online shops.
As Tim O’Reilly once […]
Free Culture Movement Timeline - on a chalkboard
At MIT’s Beyond Broadcast 2007, the working group “Free Culture Activism and the Mass Media Conversation” made this great timeline of the free culture movement on a chalk board.
Link to photo on flickr, link to full size (BIG!) (via)
Metaweb’s freebase combines Wikipedia-style encyclopedia and meta data. Rocks.
While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.
Strong words, when coming from Tim O’Reilly.
Freebase is metaweb’s first project. While […]
How Gaming Transforms (us & itself)
Lately I’ve been getting more and more into how gaming influences us, culture, our media consumption, user interfaces… - you name it. Partly this is because I’ve been involved in some Second Life stuff, partly because of the whole debate about out-lawing so-called “killer games” that had been clogging up German newspapers for quite a […]
OpenCongress: Making political decisions transparent by mashing up all available data
About a year ago, Participatory Culture Foundation brought us the Democracy Player, a great open source media platform that can do much more than show you some video clips. (Although it’s pretty good at that, too.) The same bunch recently founded another organization, Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF).
PPF now teamed up with the always-impressive Sunlight […]
YouTube pays labels for pirated songs, cuts content deals with BBC
A lot’s been happening around YouTube during the last couple of days. First there were news about YouTube paying labels and content owners a share of the ad revenue generated by pirated unlicensed music:
Google Inc.’s YouTube has announced a deal with Wind-up Entertainment, an independent label, to pay it a share of revenue from advertising […]
re:publica program is online
The conference program for re:publica 07 (April 11-13, 2007, Berlin, upcoming.org link) is online. (Sorry - German only, so far.) If you happen to be in Berlin at the time, I’m sure it’s worth dropping by. Markus and his folks sure got an interesting bunch of speakers together (including, hopefully, Larry Lessig), and it’ll be […]