Some of the things that have taken my eye during recent wanderings.

This CO2 statistics calculator says that it is able to calculate the carbon footprint of your website. So the more users = the higher the carbon footprint. One example of where being an unpopular website makes you a winner. I think.

Following the links on the statistics site takes you to a site where you can buy calculate your carbon footprint and buy those credits straight away.

A couple of weeks ago Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand celebrated the ‘porting’ of Creative Commons licences. This means that we New Zealanders can apply Creative Commons licences to our work and know the licences have been adapted to the peculiarities of our law. Although the ported licences are not yet showing up on the CreativeCommons.Org site they can’t be too far away. (Unported licencing here)

TED videos are all the rage at the moment. What about the TED blog? It’s a great way to keep up with new videos as they are released. This blog post from August has a list of a 100 websites that you should know and use.

Speaking of TED videos, I’ve been following the development of an amazing internet tv and video player. Miro is free, opensource and under constant development. Currently it’s at revision 0.9.9.9.1 (it’s definitely ready for general consumption!) and as solid as a rock on both XP and Vista. I haven’t tried it on the Mac but apparently it works equally as well on both the Mac and on Linux machines.

So why Miro? Because its good looking (and that matters!) but also because it allows you to subscribe to video ‘channels’ and then to download from those channels. You can use Miro to download YouTube, Google and other videos The programme makes it really easy to find and download a host of really interesting video content. But that’s only half of it. Miro is designed to encourage people to share their own work.

There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Miro internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice. (from the Miro blog)

The developers believe that Video RSS is central to the future of open publishing on the internet. They are pushing the ideas of open access, open standards and open source.

And finally, seeing as we’re talking open standards … my current favourite gapingvoid cartoon.

Related posts:

1. Licenced

As yet New Zealand does not have specific Creative Commons Licences so for those of us who choose to licence our work in this way we are using licences which are based on US rights and laws. From the Worldwide CC website:

Our generic licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction’s laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that, though we have no reason to believe that the licenses would not function in legal systems across the world, it is at least conceivable that some aspect of our licenses does not jibe with a particular jurisdiction’s laws.

And from the Creative Commons New Zealand FAQ:

You may well feel that you don’t need to take the trouble; both sets of licences are designed to give the same bundle of rights as the generic licences, so that they can be used worldwide. However, CC feels that there are advantages to switching to a New Zealand licence if you live in New Zealand. These licences have been designed to be fully compatible with national contract and copyright law. Some benefits from using a New Zealand licence would be:

• their plain English language; easier to understand than the American legal language of the generic licences;
• because they follow national contract and copyright law, they offer explicit protection of your ‘moral rights’;
• the support offered by the New Zealand project, [and its helpful joint mailing list??];
• in the very unlikely event of any dispute over the terms of the licence, they provide that this should be heard in the courts of your own country;

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. Sunday Procrastination
3. Content Sharing

“The draft New Zealand Digital Content Strategy is a sub-strategy of the Digital Strategy, and is the government’s five-year vision for unlocking New Zealand’s stock of content and providing all New Zealanders with seamless, easy access to the information that is important to their lives, businesses and cultural identity.”

This is an important document for digital citizens to read. It seeks to address the debate about the ownership and management of digital information. A bit like the draft curriculum, this is a document that is out there for public consumption and comment.
The draft categories three types of content – formal, informal and commercial. Russell Brown (who has been part of the development of the strategy) has already developed this threefold categorisation further. Russell says,

“…you can spend years strategising and still be stuck with a basically top-down model that institutionalises all decisions and fails to capture the dynamism that drives the Internet community. The emphasis here remains on the institutional capture of both content and decisions about content.”

And further (as may interest Artichoke)

“I’d like to know how a New Zealand Creative Commons licence will interact with the generally obstructive practice of Crown Copyright, for one thing.” (italics added by me)

New Zealand has not yet adopted a localised Creative Commons license. Those of us that do slap a Creative Commons license on our blogs, photos or other works are doing so in hope that at some point the license will have some formal standing in New Zealand. There is a group that is working towards the New Zealand “jurisdiction-specific” license. It’s possible to follow some of the work being done by subscribing to the Creative Commons – New Zealand Mailing List.
I hope that the Draft Digital Content document gets people thinking and talking about digital content and ownership and all of the surrounding issues.

Related posts:

1. The Digital Strategy
2. Content Sharing
3. Licenced

He also announced a new project called Wikiversity. It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It’ll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.

This will be an interesting idea to watch develop.

In his notes from a Jimmy Wales presentation, Andy reports that the Wikipedia organisation are really concerned about quality.

“We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn’t even heard of – but I’m just teasing there.”

“We’re not there yet. We’re not as good as Britannica – yet…. So in the coming years we’re going to see a turn towards quality.”

In other surfing, I found a link to another blog called The Best Media in Life. This blog aims to show some of the gazillions of material available under Creative Commons license or in the public domain. It’s a great little site wityh heaps of links to CC texts, music and other audio.

Speaking of the Creative Commons, I have just discovered a new resource on the site They have developed new tabbed Creative Commons Search engine. Find Flickr images, use Google or Yahoo! Good stuff. This willmake it even easier to find “stuff” to use in presentations, movies and podcasts.

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. Sharing
3. Licenced