Just got back from tonight’s Creative Commons party, at which Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was brought aboard as a member of the nonprofit’s board. It was my first time meeting Jimmy in person, and I was thrilled to give him a copy of “Darknet” and to discuss possible collaboration down the road between the Wikimedia Foundation and Ourmedia.
Lots of other familiar faces in the crowd, such as David Hornick of August Capital, Mary Hodder, John Seeley Brown, Ronna Tannenbaum, Dave McClure, Dave Toole, Mia Garlick, Jeff Ubois, Mitch Kapor, Rick Prelinger and many others.
I was also excited to meet Jennifer Feikin, director of Google Video. We discussed the burgeoning pool of high-quality citizens media video, and how there’s plenty of opportunity for numerous sites to become part of the ecosystem supporting the personal media revolution.
Glenn Otis Brown (the former CC exec director who’s now with Google and whom I wrote about in “Darknet”) announced that Google was contributing $30,000 to Creative Commons’ fundraising campaign, and that beginning later tonight, an Advanced Search on Google would allow you to search out Creative Commons-licensed content. Fantastic! (Yahoo! already lets you do this.)
CC founder and chairman Lawrence Lessig (pictured above) did one of his hallmark Keynote presentations and announced two important evolutionary steps for the organization: an embrace of cc.com for the commercial side of creativity, and progress made toward interoperability between “federated free licenses,” principally the varying CC licenses and the GPL (GNU Public License) scheme found on Wikipedia and elsewhere. That will be a welcome relief to sites like Ourmedia, which are trying to support both.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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