Very Creative Commons

Great news on the Creative Commons front:

Yahoo!, whose metabolic rate of innovation has been goosed into overdrive by Google, last night release a Creative Commons search engine.  Larry Lessig, CC supremo (and Wired columnist), describes his meetings with them and why they turned out to be so productive:

They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real.

To which all I can add is: Thanks, Yahoo! Way to be very not evil.

By the way, I've recently changed my own CC license. I had assumed the right one for this blog was the non-commercial license, but after discussion with David Hornik, I realized that I really don't want to stop people from using material on this site commercially, I just want them to credit me as the source. So I've switched to a "BY: 2.0" license. It's on my About page.

Comments

[Kirk House]

This is very usable and cool technology but it seems to me that more and more of the stuff created by Yahoo, Google, etc. is just neato technology and has no way to generate revenue. And isn't this tech going to be replaced by open source alternatives in a few months anyway? I don't use google to find interesting articles to read anymore I use the ad free Blogdex and Daypop RSS feeds. Google maps is free, Gmail is free, Flickr is free, blogger is free. Where is all of the revenue going to come from?

Meta tagging is replacing the search engine. I don't use the google image search anymore. I use Flickr instead because people are smarter than any algorithm, at least for now. You can apply the same logic to Del.icio.us and google. There is an interesting article on Google here that explains the flaws in Google business model. Ads on the "edge" (a buzzword I heard repeatedly at Etech) are on the sites of the bloggers. If this is a real trend then Google is just an old school middleman with a couple of fancy algorithms and a pile of cash. They're a VC firm.

[Monique van Dusseldorp]

For all the companies that invite users to send in their pictures, emails, weblogs a logical next step would be to ask them to share their audio and videofiles as well.
(ourmedia.org does so right now, as do a number of other sites, and a next step for Flickr would also point in that direction. Just imagine to have the comments on Flickr pictures in audio format, not text. What a nice way to look at pictures, and at the same time listening to people that talked about them! Or to access short video clips in a Flickr way.).

If you can share your video files online, you can quickly establish an addictive and entertaining source of information for almost anyone. Even if I only put up clips of my 1,5 year old son, I would have a completely dedicated audience of 4 family members - the grandpartents, of whom half live an another continent - on a daily basis)

Would the most logical next step for those companies like Yahoo not be to establish a p-t-p network for the distribution of these materials? (including perhaps free voip calls etc).

Think of putting Yahoo/Flickr-video together with something along the lines of Kazaa/Bittorrent + skype as a bonus. First of all, Yahoo and others may need to do this just to keep costs down of hosting and sharing the endless stream of content they would be confronted with.

But putting up a service like this, would also result in a real network of shared TV content. Think of all the baby pictures and videos (to stay with just one topic) together – the time spent on those all added up gives you a really big audience. X million baby video clips times the audience of 4, still results in an audience of millions. And especially when roperly tagged, and enriched with all the other info coming from blogs,mails,and other online behavious, advertisers would be more than interested.

Yahoo, MSN, Google, they could all be new TV networks that way. And the audience would not just contribute video, it would also contribute bandwidth. To receive/see info, you need to be part of the network and share your computers connection to distribute content along.

That could be a powerful position to be in – network TV based on the long long end of the tail - my son's first words etc.

[christmas presents]

That is amazing! I can’t believe how rapidly all this technology is advancing. It makes me feel very simple minded. Congratulations on the wonderful work.