ActBlue is a web site that bills itself as an “online clearinghouse for grassroots action.” As the name suggests, it’s a site designed to help Democratic partisans find candidates to support, both with money and with time. But it also supplies tools to help users band together with like-minded souls — creating customized lists of…

A couple weeks ago, we mentioned Flickr added support for Creative Commons licenses to their photo uploading and hosting service. This week, they’ve announced a pretty amibitious new feature: mobile phone blogging for almost any blog service. It works like this: you setup an account at Flickr, enable moble blogging features by inputing details about…

As a tie-in to Spider-Man 2, Spite Your Face created a short movie of Spidey battling Doc Ock, done entirely with Legos. It’s a cracking good little romp, and it made me think of some of the other great Lego remixes I’ve seen, such as 2001: A Lego Odyssey and Monty Python Lego. Legos have…

Annalee Newitz has a great article in Alternet about Mash-ups, going over the copyright laws involved and how the laws are viewed in the mash-up scene. It’s an interested clash, where restrictive laws loom over digital musicians armed with low-cost computers and software that makes mixing easy. In this realm, Newitz sees mash-ups as a…

The German Heise-Verlag, a publishing house specializing in books and magazines on the IT industry, has adopted the CC licensing model. Two books are currently being offered as free downloads under the CC licenses. The first book, Mix, Burn & RIP by Janko Roettgers, looks into the future of the recording industry. The second book,…

J. LeRoy noticed two hours of audio arguments from Loving v. Virginia (a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned an anti-interracial marriage law in Virginia) at Oyez, available under a CC license. A couple days ago LeRoy released a remix of the arguments. The real-life contemporary remixreplay of the same arguments is readily apparent.

Ronaldo Lemos, project lead extraordinaire of Creative Commons Brazil, reports: Mombojó is one of the most interesting new bands in Brazil. They mix traditional Brazilian music like samba and bossa nova with electronic beats and rock. Their album, “Nadadenovo” (meaning: “nothing new”), is available online at www.mombojo.com.br. Even if they say there is “nothing new”…

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has recently gone on record stating that downloading and watching his films was fine as long as people didn’t try to make money off them. In a way, it’s a classic struggle between a filmmaker creating works he wants the world to see, while the studio that produced it would rather…

Q: How to plan a wiki? A: Hash out ideas on a wiki. So we set up a wiki and we’re holding a barn raising there. You’re invited. Our objective is to plan a “Get Content” wiki, a scalable catalog of “some rights reserved” and “no rights reserved” works. A truly international catalog of CC…

Australia Creative Resource Online, a project funded by the Australian government, has launched its pilot site. Their aim is to create a digital junkyard, and have articulated a very compelling economic argument as to why this should exist. Currently, they are taking submissions for content, and are even willing to (selectively) digitize your content for…