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Creative Commons Roadshow: Perth, September 2 2010

Want to learn more about the Creative Commons? Want to hear about the latest development nationally and beyond? Want to hear from Perth folks who’ve been using the Creative Commons as part of education, the creative industries and even government? Then the Creative Commons Roadshow is for you and, for the first time in ages, the show’s coming to Perth.

Date: 2 September 2010.
Times: 10.00 am – 3.30 pm.
Venue: State Library of Western Australia, Alexander Library Building, Perth Cultural Centre, Perth

You can check out the program here; the exact speakers are still being finalised and will be added once the details are sorted, but I’ll definitely be talking about the Creative Commons in Education during the local champions segment from 1-2. If you’re interested, please come along: it’s a free event, all you need to do is register here (and please try and indicate your areas of interest, to the CC Team know which topics to focus on during the afternoon discussion groups).

I really enjoyed being part of the Building an Australasian Commons event that the Creative Commons Australia ran in Brisbane in 2008, but it’s even better to the CC team touring the country and I hope lots of Perth folks will come and hear how Creative Commons licensing and ideas can enrich your learning, sharing, creating and more!

Update: Here’s the program for the day …
CC Roadshow – Perth – Program

Digital Culture Links: July 14th 2010

Links for July 11th 2010 through July 14th 2010:

  • Recycle, Remix and Re-use with Creative Commons on Vimeo Staff Blog [Vimeo Staff Blog] – Video-sharing website Vimeo adds support for Creative Commons licenses. Yay!
  • Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Tool [NYTimes.com] – Nifty: “Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (appinventor.googlelabs.com/about), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors. The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves. “
  • Facebook ClickCeop app to offer optional ‘panic button’ [Technology | The Guardian] – “After months of pressure to improve its online safety features, Facebook has reached an agreement to provide an application not dissimilar to the “panic button” critics have called for, which users can add to their homepage and links to the UK’s online child protection watchdog. […] Now Facebook UK is to launch a new initiative with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, one of its harshest critics, to give all users the potential to access the organisation’s advice and reporting centre. The service, accessible via a ClickCeop button, includes a dedicated facility for reporting instances of suspected grooming or inappropriate sexual behaviour. Facebook said that it marks the first time in the UK that all users, and especially the target demographic of 13-to-18-year-olds, will be able to have direct access to CEOP’s services. However, the new system is opt-in, meaning that Facebook users will have to actively choose to download, add, or bookmark the new button …”
  • Facebook relents on doll nipples ban [The Age] – Not so prudebook (just bad management): “A Sydney jeweller has castigated Facebook for its “opaque” and “arbitrary” moderation system after the site apologised for censoring her images of a nude porcelain doll posing with her works. The social networking site admitted this morning that it made a “mistake” in removing Victoria Buckley’s photos, after last week sending her several warning notices for publishing “inappropriate content” and erasing both censored and uncensored versions of the image from Facebook. “We’ve investigated this further and determined that we made a mistake in removing these photos,” Facebook said in a statement.”
  • iChatr: Chatroulette For the iPhone [TechCrunch] – “Oh, Internet, is there anything you can’t do? iChatr, a new app for the iPhone, is essentially Chatroulette for the iPhone. It’s pretty barren right now – I saw the same people once or twice – but the quality is pretty good …”

Digital Culture Links: June 28th 2010

Links through June 28th 2010 (catching up on the last week!):

  • Fairfax and content theft – mUmBRELLA – Mumbrella asks if Fairfax media is copying YouTube videos and placing them onlive via a Fairfax media player, then using them on Fairfax online properties: is this “piracy”? Aren’t Fairfax ripping off YouTube creators who are relying on advertising (on their YouTube clips) to make a little money? I’ve no idea if Fairfax has some sort of license to do this (or if it might be legal under fair dealing – although using the whole clip can’t be) but it’s an important question given the rhetoric of piracy being a problem with individuals, rather than corporations, downloading “illegally”.
  • Google’s mismanagement of the Android Market [Jon Lech Johansen’s blog] – Jon Lech Johansen’s critique of the current Android marketplace. While it’s preferable to the closed Apple App store, the Android Marketplace clearly needs a lot more work on its centralised architecture to sell and distribute apps effectively.
  • Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature [Android Developers Blog] – Android centrally nukes their first app from the marketplace and all phones using it; from the Android blog: “The remote application removal feature is one of many security controls Android possesses to help protect users from malicious applications. In case of an emergency, a dangerous application could be removed from active circulation in a rapid and scalable manner to prevent further exposure to users. While we hope to not have to use it, we know that we have the capability to take swift action on behalf of users’ safety when needed. This remote removal functionality — along with Android’s unique Application Sandbox and Permissions model, Over-The-Air update system, centralized Market, developer registrations, user-submitted ratings, and application flagging — provides a powerful security advantage to help protect Android users in our open environment.”
  • Pakistan to monitor Google and Yahoo for ‘blasphemy’ [BBC News] – “Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, for content it deems offensive to Muslims. YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing will also come under scrutiny, while 17 less well-known sites will be blocked. Officials will monitor the sites and block links deemed inappropriate. In May, Pakistan banned access to Facebook after the social network hosted a “blasphemous” competition to draw the prophet Muhammad. The new action will see Pakistani authorities monitor content published on the seven sites, blocking individual pages if content is judged to be offensive. Telecoms official Khurram Mehran said links would be blocked without disturbing the main website.”
  • ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups [Threat Level | Wired.com] – ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) tries to rally against alternative copyright licensing, even those which actually assist creators to license clearly! “ASCAP’s attack on EFF and Public Knowledge are farfetched. Those groups do not suggest music should be free, although they push for the liberalization of copyright law. But the attack on Creative Commons is more laughable than ASCAP’s stance against EFF and Public Knowledge. While lobby groups EFF and Public Knowledge advocate for liberal copyright laws, Creative Commons actually creates licenses to protect content creators. […] The licenses allow the works in the public domain, with various rules regarding attribution, commercial use and remixing. The group’s creative director, Eric Steuer, said nobody forces anybody to adopt the Creative Commons credo. “I think it’s false to claim that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s an opt-in system.””
  • dev:wordpress [Zotero Documentation] – Plugins to make the COins data on blogs visible from WordPress (ie makes Zotero recognise WordPress blog metadata).
  • Sex domain gets official approval [BBC News] – .xxx is coming: “Official approval has been given for the creation of an internet domain dedicated to pornography. The board of net overseer Icann gave initial approval for the creation of the .xxx domain at its conference in Brussels. Icann’s approval will kick off a fast-track process to get the porn-only domain set up. ICM Registry, which is backing the domain, said .xxx would make it easier to filter out inappropriate content. The decision ends a long campaign by ICM Registry to win approval. Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM, welcomed the decision and said it was “great news for those that wish to consume, or avoid, adult content”.”
  • Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review [danah boyd | apophenia] – “I’m pleased to announce a rough draft of Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review for public feedback. This Literature Review was produced for Harvard Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, co-directed by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and myself and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This Literature Review builds on the 2008 LitReview that Andrew Schrock and I crafted for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This document is not finalized, but we want to make our draft available broadly so that scholars working in this area can inform us of anything that we might be missing. Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review.”
  • Twitter has a bad day: FTC tells it off and the site’s not running well [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – “Twitter’s having a bad day. First it got told off by the US Federal Trade Commission for incidents in January and May last year when 33 accounts, including Barack Obama’s, were hacked using the company’s own internal support tools. And then it’s having to scale back on its API in order to get the site in order, according to its status page. The FTC settlement is “the agency’s first such case against a social networking site” over flawed data security. According to the FTC’s complaint, between January and May 2009, hackers who gained administrative control of Twitter were able to view nonpublic user information, gain access to direct messages and protected tweets, and reset any user’s password and send authorized tweets from any user account.”
  • 1 in 5 Android Apps Pose Potential Privacy Threat [REPORT] [Mashable] – Further fuel for Steve Jobs decision to police the Apple App store so tightly: “Mobile security company SMobile has looked into the potential privacy and security issues in more than 48,000 apps in the Android Market. The company’s findings are alarming for Android owners, since approximately 20% of Android apps request permission to access private or sensitive information.[…]. By contrast, the Android (Android) market is open, meaning that Google (Google) doesn’t minutely examine apps for approval (it did, however, ban certain apps from the Market) and Android apps don’t have to be acquired from the Market; users can obtain them from other sources, like a developer’s website. Google’s approach makes it easier on the developers, but it can also result in a security nightmare for consumers. According to the report, one out of every 20 apps can place a call to any number without approval from the user; 3% of apps can send an SMS to any number…”
  • HUGE: Twitter Lets You Automatically Follow Your Facebook Friends [UPDATED] [Mashable] – “Twitter has announced that it is launching major upgrades to its Facebook and LinkedIn (LinkedIn) applications, bringing added functionality and integration between Twitter and two of the world’s largest social networks. The new Twitter app for Facebook, which is now available here, not only allows you to syndicate your tweets to the world’s largest social network, but now has a feature that allow users to see which of their Facebook friends are also on Twitter and choose which ones they want to follow. The new feature could be huge: it brings existing Facebook connections into the Twitterverse, which is likely to spur new levels of engagement and growth.”
  • Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Suit Over Videos [NYTimes.com] – “In a major victory for Google in its battle with media companies, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement against YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google. The judge granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, saying that the company was shielded from Viacom’s copyright claims by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law generally protects user-generated sites from liability for copyrighted material uploaded by users as long as the operator of the site takes down the material when notified by its rightful owner that it was uploaded without permission. The dispute is over videos owned by Viacom that others had posted to YouTube. Viacom, which sued Google in 2007 for copyright infringement, had argued that Google was not entitled to the copyright act’s protections because Google deliberately turned a blind eye and profited from to the rampant piracy on YouTube.”
  • YouTube Video Editor [Google OS] – Useful for only the very basics, but still a useful on-the-fly tool: “YouTube has a new video editor that lets you create videos using excerpts from the videos you’ve already uploaded. You can also add a music file from the AudioSwap library, but YouTube mentions that it might display ads if you use some of the audio files.”
  • Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King [Business Insider] – “”Content is King” — no longer. Today, the world has changed. “Curation Is King.” Ok, I hear all the content-makers sharpening their knives to take me on. I’m ready. First, why content is dead: Content used to be the high quality media that came out of the very pointed end of the funnel. Articles in the New York Times. Movies from Miramax. Thursday night comedy from NBC. Books published by Simon and Schuster. Creative folks wrote pitches, treatments, sample chapters, pilots, but only the best of the best got published. Then, the web came along and blew that up. Kaboom! Now content has gone from being scarce to being ubiquitous. […] We’ve arrived in a world where everyone is a content creator. And quality content is determined by context. Finding, Sorting, Endorsing, Sharing – it’s the beginning of a new chapter […] The emergence of a new King — a Curation King, reflects the rise of the new Aggregation Economy. It is an exciting time to be in content, and the best is yet to come.”

Digital Culture Links: May 12th 2010

Links for May 10th 2010 through May 12th 2010:

  • Show us the money! Oz Budget under CC [Creative Commons Australia] – Perhaps the only outstanding thing about the Australian budget was the licensing of it (congrats to CC Australia!): “In the debate over the merits of last night’s conservative budget, there’s one thing we’d argue Swan did get right – the licensing. The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains – the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government’s responses to the economic crisis – is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed. A single document, even one that’s 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years – like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it’s huge.”
  • Roulette Russian: The teen-ager behind Chatroulette [The New Yorker] – A really odd feature from Julia Ioffe which is based on interviews with Andrey Ternovskiy, the Russian teenager who invented Chatroulette. Ioffe’s story is more about Ternovskiy leaving Russia for the US than anything else and it paints Chatroulette as a website built with equal parts of skill and naivete. It ends of a rather hollow note, implying that relationships built online are substantially less than ‘real’.
  • Confusing *a* public with *the* public « BuzzMachine – Jeff Jarvis thinks ‘a public’ is a small group, while ‘the public’ is everyone; he think Facebook needs to think this, too: “I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain…. […] That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private.”
  • Obama stresses education over iPod, Xbox [Reuters] – “President Barack Obama told college graduates on Sunday the era of the iPod and the Xbox has not always been good for the cause of a strong education. Obama said today’s college graduates are coming of age at a time of great difficulty for the United States. They face a tough economy for jobs, two wars and a 24/7 media environment not always dedicated to the truth, he said. Added to the mix are the distractions offered by popular electronic devices that entertain millions of Americans. “With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.”

Digital Culture Links: December 15th 2009

Links for December 13th 2009 through December 15th 2009:

  • Microsoft Leads By Example, Steals Plurk Code [Inquisitr] – Software giant Microsoft has long punished legitimate users in an effort to stop the piracy of its software, but apparently Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to steal….at least when they do it. Microblogging service Plurk, which has become Asia’s most popular microblogging platform is pissed, and rightly so, because Microsoft not only copied their look for a competing product launched recently in China, they actually lifted 80% of the code as well. The Plurk team writes “We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of willfully plagiarizing a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms. Of course, it just hits that much closer to home when all your years of hard work and effort to create something unique are stolen so brazenly. “
  • The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave – Useful guide to understanding Google Wave. The chapters all available for free under a Creative Commons license.
  • Is the DVR Helping or Hurting Your Favorite Show? [ArtsBeat Blog – NYTimes.com] – “Nielsen’s list of the top 10 time-shifted prime time television programs. These aren’t the 10 most-recorded shows, per se, but the 10 shows whose ratings have benefited most from time-shifted viewings. The shows, and the percentage increases that their ratings have enjoyed from time-shifting, are:
    1. “Battlestar Galactica” (59.4)
    2. “Mad Men” (57.7)
    3. “Damages” (56.3)
    4. “Rescue Me” (53.2)
    5.(tie) “True Blood” (46.9)
    5.(tie) “Stargate Universe” (46.9)
    7.(tie) “Sanctuary” (45.9)
    7.(tie) “Heroes” (45.9)
    9. “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (45.5)
    10.(tie) “10 Things I Hate About You” (44.9)
    10.(tie) “Dollhouse” (44.9)
    10.(tie) “Melrose Place” (44.9)”

Learning, Authenticity & Online Policy Primers

This year I’ve been enjoying designing and implementing a series of new assignments and assessment techniques with students in our Internet Studies programmes.  One of the most challenging things about working in Internet Studies is trying to make assignments authentic – which basically means doing assignments which can end up being meaningful and, ideally, viewable by the world-at-large on the Internet.  One assignment that has worked particularly well and I thought worth sharing is from the unit Online Politics and Power, which looks at power in various guises and instances online. 

One of the most interesting ways power is deployed online is through those infamous Terms of Use and Terms of Service which 95% of people never read, but always agree to, when signing up for a new service.  So, I thought it’d be useful to ask students to really interrogate the Terms of Service of some online tools and platforms.  More to the point, I wanted this to be a useful assignment beyond the confines of a university unit.  So, I asked students to find a way to communicate the core elements of some Terms of Use in a way that would be accessible to the general public, hence an Online Policy Primer.  (If you’re interested the assignment outline and requirements are online here.)

I have to say, I was blown away by how good the Primers are, and how, ultimately, useful they are, too.  Also, while we did discuss the Creative Commons, I didn’t stipulate that students had to use a CC license, but I was delighted that many chose to do so.  Of those that did, I’d like to share three stand-out examples. 

The first, by Paula (@MXYZ_), takes a close look at Flickr’s Terms of Service and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attributions Share-Alike license [CC BY SA]:

The second, by Simon (@whoisimon) explores the Terms of Service for Slideshare and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license [CC BY NC SA]:

And the third, and final, policy primer I wanted to highlight is by Chea Hwey Yea, looking at Twitter’s Terms of Service and is also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license [CC BY NC SA]:

These are just three examples of the many, many wonderful primers students created; while not everyone used a Creative Commons license, three more Primer’s worth highlighting are a machinima presentation exploring Second Life’s Terms of Service created by Rhys Moult,  Renee Bird’s close look at the Terms of Use for the Multiplayer Online Game Evony, and Veronica Fry’s analysis of YouTube’s Terms of Service.

As you can see, these students have a lot to be proud of and have, in many cases, created Primers which are likely to be useful well beyond the confines of the unit!

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