Source: The Guardian UK
Thursday April 14, 2005

MP3 blogs are growing in popularity, attracting thousands of users daily. But while bloggers see their relationship with the industry as one of cooperation, it is a legally grey area. Chris Alden reports

The Guardian

“Find a feeling, pass it on.” So sang pop dreamers The Coral two summers ago: these days, it’s the mantra of a new breed of musical bloggers.

MP3 bloggers, as they are known, are people who hunt down and post musical gems — usually hard-to-find or niche MP3s — for others to discuss and, for a limited time, download.

Simon Pott from Bristol is one. As main contributor to Spoilt Victorian Child, a group blog named after a 1993 B-side by The Fall, he thinks of himself as a kind of DJ for the internet.

“I can’t help it,” he says. “If you pick a record up or are listening to something great, you can’t wait to play it out and share your excitement. When I’m at home listening through my records I get the same feeling.”

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Source: We Make Money Not Art
December 30, 2006

A short recap of Creative Commons-founder Lawrence Lessig‘s evangelization talk (or rather motivation session for the converted) at 23C3 in Berlin about the differences between culture and code.

The fundamental change is the fact that code had been used to create things like printer-drivers and such. But – since a few years, code, or rather the tools that had been coded have become a main element in the creation of culture as we use and witness it today. Especially the whole mashup-culture is heavily relying on the techniques and the mindset of digital creation and open access to other’s works for sampling from and building upon, etc. Popular examples are the anime music-clip subculture like the Muppet Hunter, the Jesus Christ the Musical-clip or lots of pieces that borrow from news networks’ footage to make their own suggestive edits.

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Image source: blogimg.goo.ne.jp
Text source: Apophenia

October 08, 2005

After great comments and good conversations, i want to take a second stab at explaining the shift i was asking for wrt copyright and remix. My argument is that we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption. Remix happens as a bi-product of consumption. What we’re remixing is culture and the active consumption of culture is part of identity development and living as a social creature in society.

Think about clothing consumption. Few people buy all of the items on the mannequin. You buy different pieces and mix and mash them. You might even decide to alter them by adding patches, by dying them, by cutting them up. You make the clothing yours. And then you share your consumption with the world by parading on the streets. In this way, you make the clothing tell your story. (tx Kevin Bjorke)

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Source: iCommons.org

September 8, 2006

Five years ago on this coming Monday, the World Trade Center ceased to exist. On the way to a dinner party recently on the upper West side of Manhattan, I stopped at the site where it once stood to take some photographs. There’s not much to capture though, as five years after the Twin Towers came down there is still little more than a gaping void in the ground.

What will eventually go up in their place is the Freedom Tower, a long debated and long planned memorial to those who died on September 11. But the rebuild in that space has been hampered by security concerns, power grabs, and what’s of particular interest to the commons community – a debate about the originality of the planned 1,776-foot building.

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(Source: First Monday)

November, 2006

Abstract Digital art has expanded, challenged, and even redefined notions of public art and supported the concept of a networked commons. The nature of agency within online, networked “systems” and “communities” is crucial to these developments. Electronic networks enable exchange and collectivist strategies that can question existing structures of power and governance. Networks are public spaces that offer enhanced possibilities of interventions into the social world and of archiving and filtering these interventions over time in an ongoing process. Networked activism and tactical response as well as artistic practice that merges physical and virtual space and augments physical sites and existing architectures are among the practices that are important to the impact of digital public art on governance.

Read the entire article at First Monday

(Source: First Monday)

November 2006
Abstract
Wikipedia is an free, online encyclopaedia which anyone can add content to or edit the existing content of. The idea behind Wikipedia is that members of the general public can add their own personal knowledge, anonymously if they wish. Wikipedia then evolves over time into a comprehensive knowledge base on all things. Its popularity has never been questioned, although its authority has. By its own admission, Wikipedia contains errors. A number of people have tested Wikipedia’s accuracy using destructive methods, i.e. deliberately inserting errors. This has been criticised by Wikipedia. This short study examines Wikipedia’s credibility by asking 258 research staff with a response rate of 21 percent, to read an article and assess its credibility, the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Staff were either given an article in their own expert domain or a random article. No difference was found between the two group in terms of their perceived credibility of Wikipedia or of the articles’ authors, but a difference was found in the credibility of the articles — the experts found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.

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(Source: First Monday)

November, 2006

Abstract
This paper is concerned with gifting: giving not motivated by a direct, immediate, or obvious benefit. We analyze a popular technology used for gifting: the BitTorrent file–sharing system. We determine features associated with high levels of gifting and suggest changes to the protocol and to the design of associated BitTorrent Web sites to promote it. We then extend our conclusions and suggestions to gifting technologies in general.

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(Source: Morning Edition)

November 7, 2006 ·

Time magazine has named the video-sharing Web site YouTube as its “Invention of the Year for 2006.” The magazine says YouTube’s scale and sudden popularity have changed how information is distributed.

(Source: Time.com)

November 22, 2006

Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.

One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, cheap propecia thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.

[…]

This is a Youtube video of man presenting a paper in a conference on Remix Culture.  Other videos on copyright are also found in this section of Youtube.