We’re honored to have Twitter’s support, since the social networking site has played a huge role for CC over the past year. We use Twitter to engage directly and efficiently with people worldwide who care about participatory culture and the innovation and social good that come from it, and as a nonprofit we’re grateful for this valuable medium for giving and getting feedback, promoting projects, and announcing milestones. If you’re not one of the more than 240,000 people already following us on Twitter, visit our page and become one! It’s a simple way to stay up to date with all things CC.

Help ensure that Creative Commons is around for another seven years! We need everyone’s contribution in this final push for our 2009 annual campaign, so please donate today!

This week marks Creative Commons’ 7th birthday, and Twitter is helping us celebrate by generously matching all donations made to our annual fundraising campaign for the next week, up to $3,000. Even if you’ve already contributed, give whatever you can today – Twitter will match your donation so that it goes twice as far towards supporting CC.

Creative Commons uses Twitter to engage directly and efficiently with people worldwide who care about participatory culture and the innovation and social good that come from it. Twitter provides a valuable way for nonprofits like us to give and get feedback, promote projects, and announce milestones. If you’re not one of the more than 240,000 people already following us on Twitter, visit our page and become one! It’s a simple way to stay up to date with all things CC.

Here’s another way to support Creative Commons during its birthday week: When you tweet this week, include the hashtag #cc and link to our support page, to let your community know that you value the work Creative Commons does:

Click here to tweet Twitter is matching donations to @creativecommons! http://bit.ly/5qiRE8 Show your support http://bit.ly/10w0w8 #cc.

We need everyone’s contribution in this final push for our 2009 annual campaign, so please donate today!

December’s ccSalon SF will be a celebration of CC’s 7 years and the wrap-up of our 2009 annual fundraising campaign, so if you’re located in the SF Bay Area, we hope to see you there!

On the evening’s agenda:

• We’ll hear from Twitter‘s General Counsel, Alex Macgillivray. Alex was previously Deputy General Counsel at Google and has been a supporter of Creative Commons from our very beginning.
• A unique installation and presentation of the dublab/Creative Commons art and music collaboration, Into Infinity, an online project built on audio loops and circular canvases paired together in infinite combination. Salon-goers will have the chance to draw on some of these 12-inch canvases as well as participate in a live recording of an 8-second audio loop – so get creative and bring a noisemaker of some kind (kazoo, bell, travel guitar, etc.) to help us make some sweet sounds! We’ll submit the best one to Into Infinity.
• CC’s Vice President, Mike Linksvayer, will highlight some of CC’s major accomplishments from 2009 and talk about what’s in store for CC in 2010.

This salon will be a great chance to meet and talk to members of the CC staff, connect with other free culture enthusiasts from the Bay Area, or just learn more about Creative Commons.

When: Thursday, December 17, 7-9pm
Where: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St. (map and directions). Plenty of street parking available. (Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.)

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for the annual campaign at the door.

Check out the event posting and let us know you’re coming on Facebook or Upcoming. We hope to see you there!

Can’t be at the San Francisco Salon? You can still help us celebrate CC’s 7 years! CC friends, fans, and supporters across the globe are invited to find creative ways of celebrating the past seven years of CC successes and growth. We want to celebrate Creative Commons using the same ideals of openness, innovation, collaboration, and freedom that are central to CC, so the possibilities are limitless: create a remix or video, bake “CC” cupcakes, host a screening of a CC-licensed film, organize an informal salon or meet-up, plan an event around Public Domain Day on January 1, the list goes on. What CC has accomplished in just seven years is phenomenal and worth celebrating in any form!

Let’s mark the week of December 14th (and beyond!) as a celebration of free culture, creativity, and knowledge! Use the tag CC@7 and add any and all photos/videos/blogs/etc. to the 7th Birthday Wiki Page so we can highlight how people are celebrating CC that week. Questions? Contact development[at]creativecommons.org.

Article CC BY-NC by Sydney Rock and Rachel Harrus

Remember back in April when I first mentioned Student Journalism 2.0, ccLearn’s pilot project to bring Creative Commons and the power of new media into high school journalism classes? Well since then ccLearn and two SF Bay Area high school journalism classes have been busy getting the ball rolling.

Yesterday, The Paly Voice, the student-run newspaper at Palo Alto High School, announced the integration of CC licenses, allowing its writers to choose to share their articles and op-ed pieces with the world. Already, Sydney Rock and Rachel Harrus’s article announcing the collaboration has gone viral via the CC BY-NC license, as the CC Google Alert picked it up and placed it squarely inside my morning radar. From the article,

“Starting today, readers of The Paly Voice may notice a new graphic — a Creative Commons licensing logo — tagged at the bottom of some stories.

The addition is due to a new collaboration with Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation that allows published work to be available to the public for fair and legal sharing.

As a part of the Student Journalism 2.0 Project, The Paly Voice, along with the staff of El Estoque, the student news publication of Monta Vista High School, and the staff of The Broadview at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, is the first high school in the nation to use Creative Commons licensing, which could potentially revolutionize the way creative works are available online.
…
Campanile adviser Esther Wojcicki, who is the chair of the board of directors for Creative Commons, believes that the collaboration will positively influence student journalism at Paly.

“It gives people the legal right to share their story,” Wojcicki said. “It’s like your own PR firm.”

Click to read the full article. For more about Student Journalism 2.0, visit our website, fan our Facebook page, or follow our Twitter.

Unlike many websites which let user upload their own content, cadyou is moderated ensuring that each file made available reaches quality standards, is tagged well and has great thumbnails so it is easy to find what you need.

Sign up today for unlimited free downloads!

The idea is to post a tweet to Twitter letting @tweetCC know that what license (or waiver, in the case of CC Zero) you want your feed to be under, and then the service keeps track of your choice for the rest of the web’s reference. Users can also look up whether and how a given Twitter user has chosen to license their feed. Right now, our Public Domain Dedication is the default and thereby most popular choice, but take a look at the rest of our licenses offered on the site, and CC license your twitter feed today!

Identi.ca has a feature allowing you to view (or subscribe via a feed) all microbloggers a particular account subscribes to. So we’ve made the CC identi.ca account subscribe to the microblogs of CC jurisdiction project leads, staff, board members, and interns, creating a microblog version of the Planet Creative Commons blog aggregator.

Visit http://identi.ca/creativecommons/all to see.

We’ve also used Kent Brewster’s identi.ca badge to embed the feed in the sidebar of Planet Creative Commons.

Also see our post from July, when identi.ca launched, on how the service is pushing comprehensive openness — free software and free culture.

Pluto-Charon system / European Southern Observatory / CC BY

(Pluto and Charon are dwarf planets. See our recent post on freely licensed images from ESO for more.)