My friend Anne Baird blogged today about her insights regarding the use of Creative Commons as a form of managing the usage rights to creative works such as music, pictures, video or writing. For many people, the only law they have ever heard of in regard to using the work of others is copyright law, and this is usually interpreted as “you cannot use this!” That’s not exactly correct of course… copyright means “you cannot use this without asking my permission”. Unfortunately the process of getting that permission is usually not so simple, so for most people the choice is to not use the work at all, or to use it illegally.

Enter the world of Creative Commons. Creative Commons, or CC for short, was launched in 2001 and is a licensing model for defining how an artistic or intellectual work may (or may not) be used. It sits in that void between the restrictive copyright model and the free-for-all that is the Public Domain. Too often people assume that because they found something on the Web that they have carte blanche to use it any way they like. Not so. By default, every creative work is instantly and automatically covered by copyright as soon as the author creates it so the right to borrow, steal, reuse or adapt these works is automatically forbidden. Aside from the sometimes vague notion of “fair use” and some specific exceptions, you are generally NOT entitled to reuse someone else’s work without their express permission. Added to the sometimes seemingly illogical restrictions that copyright imposes are the significant variations in the way copyright law is applied from country to country, providing a recipe for general confusion about what you can and can’t do with someone else’s work.

Perhaps Creative Commons licensing can be best summed up from this description on their own website…

“Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.”

There are also some excellent videos on the CC site which make it much clearer what Creative Commons licensing is all about, including this one…

If you look back the the development of art, architecture, design, cinema or literature of the last century, much of it was shaped by the ability to build on the work of those that went beforehand. Impressionist artwork inspired the Post-Impressionists, which in turn inspired others to create the movements of Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Dada. Each of these movements was built on the ideas and work of those that preceded it. As Picasso noted, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Some of the most influential works of art in the last century were only possible because the artists were able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them and build on their ideas. Some, like Marcel Duchamp, were able to change the course of artistic history with acts as simple yet profound as painting a moustache on Michaelangelo’s Mona Lisa, causing an entire generation of artists to deeply question the notion of what art was really all about.   Indeed, the very notion of appropriation - using the work of those that came before you as a basis for you own work - is a fundamental characteristic of Post Modernism.  And you have to ask yourself, if the notion of copyright as we understand it today had existed in the earlier part of this century, would we have had any of this intellectual and artistic explosion of ideas?  Or would Picasso have been threatened with legal action after painting Le Demoiselles d’Avignon because it borrowed too heavily on the art of Africa, or the work of Georges Braque?

CC licensing adds some common sense back into the way content creators allow others to use their work.  It adds some balance and moderation, letting content creators decide just how restrictive or not they wish to make the reuse of their work.  We have allowed ourselves to become a society where we legislate against nearly everything, and in the process we have lost some of the humanity that goes along with sharing and spreading ideas and mentoring to the masses.

Many of the senior courses I have been teaching over the last few years have really harped at the students about the idea of respecting copyright, as they should. But I’m realising that I have not paid nearly enough attention to the alternatives to copyright such as Creative Commons or Copyleft. If you’ve also not paid attention to these alternatives, now is the time to start looking at them seriously.

By letting our children stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them we give them a broader perspective and a deeper creative vision for the possibilities.

You might think that your world of browsing the web begins and ends with that little blue “e” logo on your desktop, but you might be surprised at just how many other (better?) alternatives exist out there. Over the years I’ve probably had a play with just about every web browser I can lay my hands on, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the others.

Browser life began in 1992 with the granddaddy of them all, Mosiac. However, after the famous “browser wars” between Netscape and Microsoft many years ago, it seemed like Internet Explorer was destined to be the only browsing kid on the block. Of course, for the alternative thinkers amongst us, there were some notable options like the wonderful Opera browser which just got better and better with every version, but for all intents and purposes it appeared that Microsoft had won the browser battle with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Was it a better browser? Probably not.

Like so many technologies, the race does not always go to the swiftest, strongest or most technically able, but to the one that gets the marketing edge over its opposition. Once this marketing edge begins to form a positive feedback loop the adoption rate starts to feed itself and it gets very difficult to justify an alternative, even if the dominant technology is not necessarily the best technology. Because Microsoft had the ability to bundle IE with its Windows operating system it was in a unique, and many say unfairly anticompetitive, position to force its browser onto users who didn’t even question this imposition. There was a browser built in to Windows, it was free, there was a shortcut on the desktop, so why not use it? Add to this the fact that Microsoft “extended” the ability of IE with a whole bunch of proprietary technologies such as Sharepoint, and people slowly got locked into the idea that the web needed IE to work properly…

Of course, Netscape never really went away. In a stroke of inspired genius, or possibly desperation, Netscape decided to give away the source code for its browser to the Open Source community and gave birth to the Mozilla Foundation. With a global volunteer workforce of dedicated programmers and engineers, the end result - Firefox - has evolved into what many believe is the world’s best web browser. With a sleek and lean codebase, sensible security features, plenty of extensibility and customisation options with Add-Ins and Themes, Firefox has plenty of good stuff to talk about. It’s fast, it’s powerful and it’s free, both as in speech and as in beer. Firefox has also forked off other into interesting browser projects such and Camino and Flock.

There are other players too, like Apple’s Safari, itself built on KHTML code, which forms the basis of KDE’s Konqueror, another browser with an Open Source Linux heritage. Using a variation of the KHTML source code, Apple developed a rendering engine called Webkit and this in turn spawned more browsers such as Shiira, OmniWeb, Sunrise, wKiosk, and Bumpercar. Webkit also forms the basis of a diverse range of other related web tools such as Adium, Growl, SubEthaEdit and Vienna.

As you can see, there are plenty to choose from, and every browser has its own distinct features or tools that its creator feels make it the “best” browser. In particular, this is true of Flock. I looked at this browser a while ago, but as so often happens when you look at lots of things quickly, its easy to overlook the obvious benefits. Flock is built on the core Firefox engine, so its fast and stable, but it also has a few added features which make it a pretty interesting alternative for anyone who does a lot of work with Web 2.0 tools. The Flock website describes it like this…

Flock is an amazing web browser built on fast and secure Mozilla technologies. View and share photos with an innovative new photo bar in the browser. Subscribe to your favorite websites to get the freshest content automatically, in summaries that are easy to save and blog. Search more quickly, more effectively, and more richly with the innovative Flock Search Toolbar. Download the Flock beta and you’ll be spreading the word that there’s a new way to web.

Some of the neat things I’ve discovered in Flock (thanks to a chat I had with Judy O’Connell the other day) are the ways in which it integrates with services such as Flickr. Photos stored in your Flickr or Photobucket accounts can be easily accessed and added to blog posts, and with many new Nokia phones now having direct Flickr integration, this could get pretty interesting. Flock also has some pretty innovative features for storing photos or snippets of information that you find while browsing the Web, so you can reuse them later. The inbuilt search tools dig through not only the Web’s major search engines like Google and Yahoo! but also your own local bookmarks, giving and added richness to searches. It comes with a very easy to use inbuilt RSS feedreader, shared online bookmarks to del.icio.us or Shadows, and a neat blog integration feature that let’s you select any text on a webpage to instantly create a post about it and add it to your blog… (in fact, this post you’re reading right now began life as an experiment in using that very feature). For those times when you want to blog about other stuff you find online, Flock appears to have some incredibly useful features.

So check it out… if you’re a serious blogger, Flock looks like a very interesting alternative!

technorati tags:firefox, explorer, flock, opera, camino, safari, mozilla

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat” and have been finding it a compelling and interesting read. I think he has really clearly identified and explained the trends and convergences that have brought us to what is arguably one of the most important inflexion points in world history.

If you get a chance to read the book I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you might like to have a look at this video (http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/) of Friedman giving a speech to a group of students and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this talk he gives an excellent overview of the book and explains some of its key ideas. The speech lasts about 75 minutes in total and its the sort of thing you need to really sit and watch in its entirety, but well worth it. Maybe watch it instead of TV one night…

One of the interesting concepts I’ve read about is The Long Tail. It’s a phenomonon I’d noticed and had kinda thought about but had never really heard it explained in such an obvious way. The term was coined by Chris Anderson from Wired magazine.

One of the interpretations of the Long Tail basically refers to the notion that if lots of people are able to publish content to a small specialised audience that is so niche and so targeted then the collective sum of all these small publications will start to eat into the audience share of the mainstream media publications.

If you map this phenomenon as a graph of the popularity of various publications versus the number of actual publications, then the graph looks like the diagram here… a chart that has a small number of publications with relatively high levels of popularity on the left, and a large number of publications with low levels of popularity as you move to the left… giving the shape of the “long tail”.

It’s occurred to me lately just how much I’ve been living on this “long tail”. I hardly watch mainstream TV or listen to mainstream radio anymore… I listen to lots more podcasts now than live radio, because I get to listen to what I want to listen to, when I want to listen to it, and don’t have to rely on the mass media who really has no idea about what I’m interested in. Same with blogs… I read blogs regularly and rarely read mainstream newspapers, so I’m really feeling the effect of the long tail. Every minute I spend watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, is one more minute that I’m not giving to the major networks. And as more and more people move away from the mainstream media for the information that interests and entertains them, this notion of the long tail is having a huge influence on the economics of the way we have traditionally consumed media.

Take this snippet from the New York TV website for example…

For years, networks have trembled at the idea of selling individual episodes because it fundamentally undermines the way TV works—or used to work. But after the success of ABC’s bold toe-in-the-pool partnership with iTunes, NBC and CBS last week announced plans to sell their own shows through video-on-demand services for 99 cents an episode. And suddenly it’s not so hard to envision a future (by which I mean two years, not twenty) in which you buy most of your TV shows the way you do, say, magazines - subscribing to some, picking and choosing others. At which point there’s no more need to stick to the half-hour/hour-long model on TV than there is for magazines to publish each issue at precisely 100 or 200 pages.

There are plenty of other implications of the Long Tail. It’s a classic example of the way the web has democratised the world we once knew, changing many of the old rules forever. There are now millions of people sharing their ideas, having a voice, expressing opinions and putting their thoughts “out there” for anyone to pick up on.

The thing that many folk find somewhat hard to understand is that there are people out there who do pick up on this stuff. It seems that no matter how specialised or offbeat your interests are, the web is enabling people with similar interests to get together. It’s creating a whole new breed of media publishers - bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, Flickr sharers, etc - who can now have a voice, no matter how small, and are still finding an audience that is interested to hear what they have to say. The vast majority of this “publishing” would be totally economically unviable under the old mass media model, but are now totally feasible thanks to the web.

It’s no wonder the big media networks are getting nervous about losing their audience. They ought to be. The long tail is only going to get longer.

According to this article from Edutopia, the one billionth user connected to the World Wide Web sometime last year. I have no idea how anyone arrives at these sorts of statistics, but it probably doesn’t really matter. The point is that it’s a big number, and there are lots and lots of people from all over the world who are becoming part of this phenomenon we call the Internet.

But in the age of Web 2.0 - the read/write web - I found this paragraph particularly poignant…

“The striking thing to me about that milestone is not the enormity of the number, however. More interesting, perhaps, is that the one billionth person to jump onto the Web could just as easily been an eight-year-old kid from Sweden or the South Bronx (or, for that matter, an eighty-year-old from South Africa) who sat down at a computer, opened a browser, and for the first time started connecting to the sum of human knowledge we are collectively building online. Furthermore, that eight-year-old had just as much ability to start contributing what she might know about horses or her hometown or whatever her passions might be, becoming an author in her own right, teaching the rest of us what she knows.”

It’s the whole Wisdom of Crowds thing… the idea that we are collectively smarter than any of us could be as individuals. I think that’s really food for thought.

I just watched the most amazing documentary on the 9/11 attacks from 5 years ago. It was just called, simply, 9/11.

It was on TV last night, and had a bunch of footage that I’d never seen before. Considering the huge amount of press coverage that the attacks got when they first happened, and how well documented the events have been since then, I was surprised to find that there was still such a large chunk of footage that I’d never ever seen before.

The documentary was made by two French filmmakers that were actually making a doco about a young firefighter who had just joined the FDNY. They’d been following this guy around, fimling and getting to know the other fireys for a few months and had been taking their cameras out on shoots to local fires, etc. They just happened to tag along when the guys were called out to attend an unknown event on the morning on 9/11, not really knowing what they were in for. Turns out that one of the filmmakers got caught up in the foyer of the building with all the NY fire chiefs during the main part of the disaster. It was a real insiders view of events.

Our recent visit to Ground Zero was an amazing experience and made the events of five years ago so much more real. As I say, I’d never seen any of this documentary footage before, and found it to be quite compelling viewing. Well worth a look if you get the chance.