Today I uploaded my monster truck videos to YouTube and found the surprise that they are now offering the option to publish your videos under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

That is great news! YouTube is the biggest online video community and it was lacking this option, unlike its competitors Vimeo and Blip.tv.

But what does this mean?

Before this, all user uploads were licensed with full copyright, the famous “All Rights Reserved”, which means that if you want to use, distribute, share or remix (create a derivative work) you had to obtain explicit consent from the video author for doing so. This new option of licensing is a very important deal, because it meas that being the big video distributor that YouTube is, it will be a great platform for a lot of commons content that we can share, use and remix (of course, only material published under the CC-BY license by the author).

Although they are not giving users the ability to choose from all the six Creative Commons licenses available, they made a very smart choice of simplifying the options to the users by offering only the most free one. It benefits us all in the tech and culture worlds.

Free Culture = Free World

If you wish to change all your previously uploaded videos to CC license, you can go to your list of uploaded videos, mark the checkboxes on the left on all videos (or just mark the top one to auto select all), click the “Actions” button and select the menu option “Creative Commons (CC-BY)”.

I hope to see CC licensing in other Google products like Picasa web albums, like Flickr does. But anyways, the YouTube offer is a great milestone for Creative Commons. Lets just wait and see what new creations and remixes this move brings to the world.

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Good news to those still fans of the Del.icio.us social bookmarking site. On the delicious blog is now news that Yahoo! Inc has sold the property to the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Delicious will keep existing and will be part of their new company AVOS.

From the AVOS website, we read the following:

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

That means that the service will continue to operate, and even better, to improve. So hopefully we can see a Firefox 4 compatible version of their browser plugin anytime soon. Lets see what else they come up with to improve the current site.

Some changes are already set. If you log in to your delicious account you will be prompted to confirm your authorization of migrating your data from Yahoo to the new Delicious home servers. If you do not authorize, your account will not be migrated and thus will be deleted.

I already signed up for the migration, and although I’ve been critical of proprietary software as a service solutions, I find delicious (and its firefox & chrome plugin integration) very handy and useful. I’d love to see free bookmarking services like Scuttle to improve to match Delicious, or see how Freelish.us develops, but in the mean time, I’m still a Delicious bookmarks user.

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The people from StatusNet have released freelish.us, intended to be a social bookmarking site to replace the almost dead del.icio.us. And I say intended because its more than that. Its actually a modified instance of the status.net microblogging software, so you can use it as you use identi.ca or twitter, but tags, links, images and videos get displayed differently than on the default versions, making it the perfect mix between microblogging and social bookmarking. You get all the benefits of the social and federated microblogging platform, like groups, tags and threaded conversations with your bookmarks.

You can import bookmarks from del.icio.us and there’s a bookmarklet so you can save any site quickly from your browser. The best part, is that you can also use Emacs Identica-mode with Freelish.us to save your bookmarks from Emacs!

I hope that these changes also make it to identi.ca to make it even more awesome than it is now.

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I’m very happy to announce the release 1.0 of the Emacs identica-mode microblogging client. Its been a while since the last release, and its been for a good reason! The main improvements are:

• HTTP backend rewrite

  The backend that makes the HTTP connections has been completely rewritten to use url.el mode instead of the previous networking calls. This has made a big improvement on speed and reliability. Emacs no longer hangs for a while on crappy or slow connections.

• Free network service URL shortening

  Support for the FNS URL shortening services Ur1.ca and TightURL have been added, with Ur1.ca as the default option. Previous services are also available through M-x customize-group identica-mode. Also added support for Google’s goo.gl url shortening service.

• Support for group and tag timelines

  Now you can follow group and tag timelines, pressing C-c C-g for group timeline and C-c C-t for tag timeline. Also, pressing while the cursor is on a tag, username or group it will switch to that element’s timeline.

• Added support for unicode named tags and groups

Basically you’ll notice a speed and stability improvement overall.

I also want to welcome Jason F. McBrayer and Shyam Karanatt as regular contributors and members of the Emacs Identica-mode project at Savannah. Hope we can get more contributors to get this project further.

Download Emacs Identica-mode v1.0

Contribute

As always, if you have any ideas for features, patches or bug fixes, please add them to the identica-mode bug tracking list.

You can also help out if you’ve liked Emacs identica-mode and have some spare change. It would be great to support this project by making any kind of donation on the “tip jar” in appreciation of the hours invested on its development and improvement.

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Google marking all sites as unsafe

Google marked all search results as unsafe websites, and when you clicked on the link, it warned you again and you had to agree to go to the website. This might not cause a big issue for computer savvy people that know where they’re going, but for other people (and that actually read warning messages) this might scared them away. Probably a lot of business was lost from users going for the first time to a site and got this warning.

You can read more about this at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5251742.stm http://techtrends.co.uk/news/google-marks-the-whole-internet-as-unsafe http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/172231

Youtube’s fair use massacre

Warner music and Youtube have been taking down videos with copyrighted music on this service. If you have a video of your kid dancing to a Warner music song, so someone is whistling one or if its in the background of your birthday video, it might be taken down.

The EFF has called this “The fair use massacre” since these videos are righfully using the material under fair use terms but they are being taken down anyway.

You can read more about this with these links:

http://www.getmiro.com/blog/2009/02/youtubes-fair-use-massacre/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10150588-93.html

It is becoming more and more evident that support for free networking service software is needed before we loose our data and specially our freedom. Support projects like Laconica with Identica being its biggest implementation (follow me on identica http://identi.ca/gabrielsaldana”), Wikipedia, Launchpad (now that it will be AGPL licensed), Elgg and many others listed here. Learn more about free network services at the autonomo.us website.

“Before the storm” image is Creative Commons by Steve Wall.

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