AdTension. “My main point here is that we need to get out of the advertiser-centered frame of mind about how markets for information work. We need to start imagining the markeptlace as it exists now, and wants to exist, in the online world. This is a marketplace where customers are participants, and not just consumers. Where they are no longer just a mass of passive ‘eyeballs’.”
Archives for 2005
Better late than never:
spurred on by my post yesterday, I have finally licenced the content of mikel.org under a Creative Commons Canada by-nc-sa license. It was really just inertia that kept me from doing it before, or at least since November 2004 when Canadian CC licences were first made available.
Wish list? Movable Type makes it easy to create a US license right in the site preferences. Frankly, though, I think it’s obnoxious that Six Apart has a US-centric feature embedded in their software when International versions do in fact exist. I also wish the Creative Commons Canada people had: a) made it easier to download the appropriate graphic and store it locally (with instructions for those who don’t know how); and, b) I wish they’d included size attributes in the image tag itself. Small details, but important ones.
Karl Dubost wrote an excellent
post on his wonderful La Grange site that poses some questions about the intersection between Creative Commons licenses and microformat services such as Technorati and others. The central question: do the analysis services provided by Technorati (and Google and others) infringe upon some Creative Commons licensing schemes, which explicitly prohibit commercial use of content?
It’s a tough question, for sure, and one whose answer will only really come over the course of time. For my part, I think when we look at such questions we have to be very careful to look at exactly what kinds of things services like this are actually doing with content, whether under CC license or traditionally copyrighted.
So, when aggregation and analysis services are “using” someone’s content, what does that really mean? Does it mean they are in fact “republishing” text or images elsewhere? Or is it more a question of aggregating texts from many sources and in that way using the fact that a text exists and not the text itself? On the other side, what does “Non Commercial” mean? Certainly it means that I couldn’t, for instance, take a text written by someone else and publish it in a book that I publish for profit. But does it mean that I can not, in the course of my commercial activity, even read the text? It seems obvious that it does not – but has the question been answered “officially” yet? Likewise, am I allowed to note the fact that the text and a certain point of view expressed in the text exists, and use that fact as data aggregated with other similar data points?
Without answering those questions, I think that a couple of issues jump right out. First of all, I believe (can anyone confirm?) that CC licenses are machine-readable. If not they should be, and I think it would be a boon to the community for notable companies working in this area – Technorati and Google, for example – to step up and detail exactly what they will do with content and how they will automatically process the various licenses that are out there. And second, I think the community of “content providers” (that would be bloggers but also other publishers, photographers and really all creators) should sustain a wide-ranging discussion on these issues on an ongoing basis.
Lastly, it is very likely that people have already worked out a lot of these issues – so I apologize for my ignorance of existing answers.
Well that was quick.
I got my invite to Odeo earlier this evening, and from my cursory look-see, the service looks pretty good. The site is easy to navigate and use, and is presented in a very straightforward manner. I downloaded the Odeo Syncr app and gave it a try, but I also was very happy to note later that you don’t have to use it – you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your subscriptions and use your normal feedreader to download the podcasts, which is probably what I’ll do.
There is an important feature that will likely be the next tempest in the blog-teapot – but that I think is totally cool and web-like. The site is to a great extent simply organizing links to podcasts that already exist elsewhere, so the original show stays only on the site it came from. At least that is the case for content that has not been expressly put into Odeo by its creator. You can be sure that there’s going to be some sort of outcry over this, but that will be misplaced to say the least.
Beyond that, the little inline Flash player is pretty good, and for some reason your subscription list is hidden and only accessible via the Sync section. It really should be a site-wide sidebar item or something.
Anyhow… I can’t wait to see the content creation tools, and maybe soon I’m going to have to motivate myself to do something in this medium. Or maybe I’ll just convince Nadia to give it a try – after all, she’s the all-pro radio host in the family. I’m sure her skills would translate very well to podcasting!
Evidently,
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- …
- 61
- Next Page »
