Scratch.mit.edu now at 400,000+ projects

Jane Park, May 7th, 2009

A couple years ago, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab developed a Web 2.0 programming platform for kids called Scratch. Scratch allows kids, and virtually anyone else, to create and remix rich media of all kinds—video, video games, even simple photo animations. The programming behind Scratch focuses on building blocks, like Legos, to get kids not only friendly, but adept at the technology that dominates our world. Each user can create a project, whether it be a video or a video game, and upload it to share on the Scratch website. Scratch currently exceeds more than 400,000 projects, all licensed CC BY-SA, allowing any youth to flex her creative muscles and enhance a peer’s project by remixing it with her own.

The School Library Journal wrote up an excellent article about them last week, emphasizing that “Literacy in the 21st century encompasses the full range of skills needed to engage in our global society—computer, information technology, media, and information literacy skills.” The SLJ reports that Scratch is now being tested in libraries in the Minneapolis area, “to determine if the workshops and classes for young people are replicable and sustainable for a range of libraries.” Unsurprisingly, library staff are finding that kids quickly learn the program on their own, and are guided more by their own intuitions than an “expert’s” instruction.

I decided to try out Scratch myself, and found some cool projects along the way. One project by “cougars” is a photo animation of a human skateboard. Another is a video game simulation of the Buggers war from Ender’s Game by PetertheGeek. (How cool is that?)

What’s more, the Scratch program is global, available in more than 40 languages, and the code itself is free for anyone to copy, publish, or distribute.

In Sapporo at Jon Phillips 4.0 Launch

Jon Phillips, July 31st, 2008

Photo by-sa Freddy B. Used with permission from Photographer.

I’m in Sapporo for the CC Legal Day, Commons Research Mini-conference which the Metrics Project is but part, and to further promote the CC Case Studies project. As Greg outlined so clearly last week and I presented at the launch of CC Singapore a few days ago, this project is doing quite well with 112 submissions from around the world assisted by a great system for supporting this community project, and even better brilliant people adding case studies daily!

Also, you kind readers might have noticed that we have launched and/or refreshed several projects over the last few weeks to prepare for a coming change. As of August, my role with Creative Commons will change from managing community and business development to being liaison in ongoing similar affairs. This also means that I will be spending most of my time on projects outside of Creative Commons — most still involve using Creative Commons licensing and technology.

I’m not leaving the culture of free and open, nor Creative Commons, both of which I have been involved with for some time. Rather, I will be, as of August 2nd, devoting most of my energy to projects I’ve been delaying or couldn’t do as effectively since I have been living and breathing Creative Commons. My job and peers at Creative Commons are amazing and working for CC, in my capacity at least which I can speak to, is a dream job. If anything, I will be pushing Creative Commons even more by action, projects, and facilitation in another capacity.

Thus, if you want to find out more about what I will be doing, you know where to find me. And, if I’ve been working with you, your business, your community, and/or organization, jon@creativecommons.org still works (and will so). I am continuing work on a couple of projects that have not launched in relationship to Open Library/PDWiki project. I also am on-demand still for speaking at events and conferences globally – particularly in Asia since I will be spending most time in China from August – December 2008. I’m still on the books and will facilitate any discussions to the appropriate people. I’m more excited that ever to keep growing the commons!

Seesmic Adds Creative Commons License Support

Jon Phillips, July 16th, 2008

Super cool video conversation site Seesmic just rolled out its most requested feature today, Creative Commons licensing of course! Seesmic added all 6 primary licenses as option and CC Attribution 3.0 as default license for videos uploaded. “This means you determine how other people can use your content. Your choices are now between six combinations of Creative Commons licenses, and “All Rights Reserved,” says Jeremy Vaught from Seesmic.

Joi already beat me to the punch in blogging about this and posted up a video. If you head over to my site or Joi’s and you can see also the video that Loic shot with me at the CC office in San Francisco yesterday.

And, if you head over to Seesmic’s main page right now, they have a community video discussion with a fair use and copyright expert (~3:30 PM PST).

Tim “ROFLcon” Hwang and I have been working with Seesmic to add this over the last few weeks and they rocked it out pretty quick! Joanne and Loic followed up with me noting where they added CC support, which is cool for others in similar position to note as well because Seesmic relies heavily at present on Flash video (like Youtube and others) and Flash-based interface elements:

• Either logged in or out you see a link where it says’s Some Rights Reserved at www.seesmic.com
• When a community member goes to post a video there is a small icon that defaults to the Attribution license, but one may click, scroll down to see the other license options and learn more.
• Community members also access CC on their profile page and in the embeddable player, where the license option links out to the selected CC license deed page.
• You can read more about our announcement at http://blog.seesmic.com/.
• Also added to CC our Terms of Service (ToS) with links to CC’s site where appropriate: http://www.seesmic.com/docs/TOS.html

As such, IANAL, and CC doesn’t provide legal support. These are just notes on how Seesmic has integrated CC licensing.

CC integration should be rewarded with traffic, right! Head on over there and start posting videos. Oh, and if you want to know the verb form of Seesmic, its to Seesmic.