The 2007 Creative Commons Fundraising Drive is under way, so if you’re concerned about ensuring that extreme copyright doesn’t kill creativity, please consider donating. For me, ensuring that copyright laws don’t lock away creative potential for the average person is incredibly important and I still think that Creative Commons is one of the great vanguards in the fight to ensure that there are better options than the two extremes of full copyright or the public domain. While both have their place, allowing the average person to make more specific choices about how their creative work(s) can or can’t be re-used is essential to creativity in the present and future, and the Creative Commons organisation, and their national versions such as the marvelous CC Australia, are doing a lot of the hard work to ensure these options exist! And just to prove I’m putting my money where my mouth is, I’ve been donating annually since 2005. I hope you’ll consider donating this year.
Inspired by last year’s CC Swag Flickr Competition, here’s my 2007 CC Vision:
And I noticed year’s swag for donators includes postcards made from the winners of last year’s CC Swag Photo competition; I wonder what sort of things will be in next year’s? 
No Australian can have missed the news that we’ll be voting in a Federal Election on November 24. The advertising onslaught has begun and, unlike past campaigns, this one’s taking online campaigning seriously, with the current Liberal government apparently spending upward of $5 million on their web-based advertising. In the lead up to the official election campaign we’ve seen Labor make considerable inroads with both MySpace and Facebook. Indeed, Team Rudd have been so clever with Facebook that Kevin not only has his maximum-allowed 5000 friends, but there is also an “I want to be Kevin Rudd’s Facebook Friend, Too!” Facebook group which has over 10,000 members and uses Facebook’s structural limitation as a popularity mechanism! Given their knowledge of web campaigning, it’s hardly a surprise that the Kevin07 web campaign is so clearly modeled on the high-profile runners for the 2008 US elections.
Things have really kicked into overdrive for both main political parties - and the others - with Google’s 2007 Australian Federal Election page which has lots of usefully aggregated material as well as a dedicated YouTube channel for each of the political parties. While the potential social affordances of these tools aren’t necessarily being explored that well by the major parties, at least the web is being taken seriously as a battleground for the minds and hearts of the Australian public. In that direction, it’s great to see Australia’s national broadcaster - the ABC - getting in on the act with their Poll Vault, which collates reporting from their various sources.
Also important for this election - and really, this is the first Australian election in which it’s been a major player - is the influx of citizen journalism and participatory cultural portals centred on the election. For example the ambitious YouDecide07 attempts to bring citizen journalists across the country together tightly focusing on the election seat-by-seat. This project is run through QUT’s Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation with Jason Wilson doing a lot of the hard yards in running the website itself, with the help of media-savvy folk like Barry Saunders. Also of note is the Election 07 Norg from the people who bring you PerthNorg. This user-voted website with at least partially user-generated content (and mainstream media reports ranked via a Digg-style voting system) is just getting started but looks quite promising. It’ll probably retain a WA flavour given it’s run here, but there’s nothing stopping sharing between this Norg and the many other mainstream and user-generated election 07 sources. Similarly the team at New Matilda have launched a focused groupblog called Polliegraph while the always political Lavartus Prodeo have kicked into election overdrive.
Of course, there are still many individual bloggers offering insightful - or sometimes just vicious - commentary but you’ve probably got your own favourites so I shan’t run through the major individual bloggers. I will, however, end by mention two newer folks well worth reading: Peter Black from Law at QUT is blogging at his dedicated sub-site Australian Politics 2.0 while Elliott Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia and Vibewire (who have their own youth-orientated political bloggers) , among other things, has upped his what it feels like for a boi into full election mode. And if you’re already over the campaign promises and just want the election-related comedy clips, Elliot’s also focused on building an Election on YouTube stream. In that spirit, as elections always bring out the most amusing video clips, I’ll finish with a satire from the self-anointed Axis of Awesome, called their Rudd Vs Howard rap…
Last year as part of Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign they produced the important and memorable Evolution video which graphically illustrated the many, many steps between a photograph being taken and the image based on that photograph ending up on a billboard or fashion magazine cover. This year Dove have, in my opinion, produced another fine clip which looks at the tirade of body images and messages young girls and women encounter through various media in their everyday life. It’s called Onslaught:
Incidentally, while I know these viral videos are something of a marketer’s dream, I don’t think that distracts from the message one little bit.
Tags: body image, dove, gender, media, onslaught, representation
[Screenshot & heavy-handed black-out courtesy of News.com.au.]
While not the most insightful of political messages, the hacking of the Australian Liberal Party website has Australian Prime Minister John Howard showing a different side! I bet the reporter who wrote this piece was hurting themselves laughing, especially with the last line:
The Liberal Party website has been hacked to make Prime Minister John Howard appear to enjoy engaging in a lewd homosexual act. Under the heading, The Liberal Party of Australia, the website reads: John Howard Says “I like to s… d…!” The Liberal Party’s federal secretariat has been contacted for comment.
I wonder what the federal secretariat had to say?
Update: The story’s last line now reads: ‘”It appears to be a hoax, but we’re checking it out,” the spokesman said.” (Someone is having real fun writing this story!
Tags: hacked, John Howard, Prime Minister
