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I took a little drive this morning to go see Old Sheldon Church. I highly recommend it! It’s a beautiful site, and the ruins are gorgeous. It reminded me of the old church ruins I saw in Ireland. There are more photos from the trip here. Enjoy!
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I’ve been a huge fan of Creative Commons pretty much since they launched. If you don’t already know, Creative Commons provides several ways for you to license your work that expressly allow people to use it in certain ways. It’s sort of copyright** – allowing folks to do things with your work that they might not otherwise be able to do legally without a lot of complicated legal wrangling. For example, there are tons of CC-licensed photos on Flickr. Depending on the license, you can use those photos for non-commercial work as long as you provide attribution, all the way to mashing them up in any way you want with absolutely no restriction. This blog has been CC-licensed since the beginning of Creative Commons. All of my photos on Flickr and presentations are too.
But, this post isn’t about my blog. It’s about Ficly (and ficlets, may it rest in peace). Back in 2006, when we first started working on ficlets, I wanted everything to be CC-licensed. Part of the motivation for that was so we could use share-alike licensed photos from Flickr. The other reason was that the share-alike license perfectly fit the premise of the site: anyone can add sequels or prequels to your stories. It took a lot of convincing to get the AOL lawyers to sign off, but after they did some digging, they realized that they didn’t have to do any work writing an additional Terms & Conditions document for the site, since the Share-Alike Attribution license (for the sticklers, out there, I think ficlets used by-sa 2.0) covered it all.
A few months ago, someone from the Creative Commons reached out and said they were writing a book of case studies of sites that use CC licenses and asked me if they could interview me. And of course, I said yes! Well, I’d totally forgotten about it until I got an e-mail that the book, The Power of Open is out now, and my little interview made the cut! You can download the PDF from the site, buy a copy for yourself, or just check out this screenshot of the page about Ficly.
I’m proud to be a part of it, and proud of the ficlets and Ficly communities for creating and sharing almost 70,000 stories with the world.
I was always a big kid, but that didn’t keep me from getting bullied at school, usually picked on because of my weight or that I was a Mormon (and usually the only one in my grade). Thankfully, it stopped by high school (probably because I was, again, big). I’m glad to see that there’s a documentary out there like The Bully Project. Bullying is horrible, and too often it’s ignored by schools and misunderstood by parents.
I don’t know how to stop it… but talking about it can only help.
I had the pleasure of working in the booth for TEDx Creative Coast and the videos are now live. Hooray! There were some amazing talks, and you should watch all of them! But, really, if you only have time for a couple, check out Tom Kohler, Christian Sottille and Ian Leslie.
You won’t be sorry!
There’s a bumper crop of stuff I can’t wait to listen to today! Hooray! But, before I get into today’s music, it’s time to talk about work for just a sec. For the past several months, we’ve been working on a new product, and I’m really proud of it. It’s a new way to do web radio and it’s coming out later this summer. If you’re interested, and you should be, you can sign up for a beta invite and be one of the first people to experience it. I can’t wait to show it to you!
Now, on to the music! And just like last week, I haven’t actually listened to these yet. I’ll try to come back and update things, but I’m pretty confident in today’s list.
There you go. If I find anything else, I’ll add it to the list. What are you listening to this week?
I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but here’s the list of albums I gleaned from today’s new releases on Rdio. I’ll try to come back and update them once I’ve actually listened to them, but I’m a busy guy, so I’ll probably forget. Here’s the queue as it stands right now:
There are some other things in the queue, but I have to go hop in the shower and get to work. I’ll try to hop back in and add other new stuff I find worth listening to and update the guesses with the results. Happy new music tuesday!
What else should I be listening to?
Tuesdays are new music day (when all the new releases come out), and for the past several months, I’ve religiously gone through the 20+ pages of new releases looking for the little gems that slip through the cracks or the albums that make my week. I usually post a couple to twitter, but hey, I have a blog, why not keep them for posterity?
So, for 4/12/2011, here are my new release finds:
I’ll try to update this post as I find more, but these should keep you busy for a while!
PS – Don’t forget, we’re still hiring!
We’re hiring! We’ve got a ton of work to do on an awesome new product and I need help!
What am I looking for? Someone who “gets” working in a startup. You’ve got to understand the pressure involved and time required to launch something and the crazy stupid optimism to believe it will succeed (even if it doesn’t). You’ll be smart, creative and willing to do the right thing even if it seems a little daft at the time.
So, here’s what we’re looking for:
And the best part? We’re right in downtown Savannah above Leopold’s Ice Cream and close to everything happening around the heart of Savannah. We’re fun to work with and are working with some amazing technology. If you’re interested, check out the postings and apply (please)!
Brian Gets Zorbed from Kevin Lawver on Vimeo.
The school’s family fun fair was Saturday night and other than an accident with a sno-cone, the kids had a good time (the grownups got to stand in lines, hold snacks and get eaten alive by bugs). There was a zorb there for the kids to ride, and Brian had a ball (other than a bit of a tumble on the way out) and I snagged some video of it (the first with my new phone). There are other pics up on Flickr. Enjoy!
I’m twitter user #3,404. I’ve been a daily twitter user since before it had vowels, so I’ve seen it grow from a fun little experiment to a platform with a lot of promise to the behemoth it is today. How I’ve used the service has changed over time, but it seems like more and more, I use it to complain. And from the folks that I follow, they’re doing the same.
Yeah, we use twitter to celebrate victories, share breaking news, and keep in touch – but it feels like the vast majority of tweets from the people I follow are sarcastic land mines – and mine are too. It’s too easy to pop open my twitter client and unleash my righteous indignation at the latest outrage perpetrated by the internet. Sarcasm is easier than productivity, encouragement, enlightenment or even humor. It’s to the point that a great percentage of my vocabulary exists only to express sarcasm.
But, it’s not helpful. It’s not even all that much fun. It’s mostly annoying and makes people more likely to be sarcastic and annoying themselves.
So, I’m going to try to stop. My challenge for myself this week is not to post any sarcastic tweets. None. Zero.
Wish me luck. It’s going to be so hard.
