Abracadabra! by Ray Newman is a new e-book that tells the story behind the making of the Beatles’ masterpiece, the 1966 album

Due to popular demand, the deadline for the Robberriff Remix Contest (previously discussed here) is being extended to August 20. Fake Science will choose the top 20 remixes and post them online for people to vote on. The creator of the highest-ranked track will win an iPod nano. Check out Robberriff’s MySpace page to listen…

The folks over at Automattic, who are also some of the brains behind the WordPress blogging system, have developed Widgets for WordPress. Widgets are a way for users to easily customize their blog’s look and feel without dropping into HTML or PHP. WpLicense 0.7.0 has been released, and includes support for rendering your selected license…

Last year frequent ccMixter collaborator Pat Chilla was discovered via a podcast of his ccMixter uploads and got a deal to do music for the next three seasons of TV show America’s Top Model. Coming full circle, or at least close to halfway around the globe, mariposaHD is a new HDTV show featuring Argentinian models,…

Annalee Newitz has a fun suggestion: I mean, it’s no accident that a horror movie like “The Ring” came out during the heyday of file sharing. Let’s think about it — the flick is about a haunted videocassette that will kill you unless you make a duplicate copy and show it to somebody else. It’s…

The fourth season of the animated series Odd Job Jack (featuring stars like Jason Alexander, John Goodman, Christian Slater, Molly Parker, and Jerry Stiller) began airing recently on Canada’s Comedy Network. The show is a riot – each episode follows a temp worker through a different employment misadventure (i.e. mortuary worker, security guard, “rodent wrangler”).…

When you select a license using the Creative Commons license engine, we return a block of HTML you can place on your web page to mark that you’ve licensed your content. Included in that block of HTML is embedded metadata that programs can detect in order to determine which license you have selected. We’ve had…

A new release of web-based office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation) ThinkFree Online adds the ability for users to mark their documents as CC licensed in ThinkFree’s DocExchange sharing portal. From ThinkFree’s announcement: “We’re particularly excited to see Creative Commons features integrated throughout ThinkFree Online’s workflow. Creators using ThinkFree Office can offer certain rights to…

We have a new Featured Commoner — an interview with Michela Ledwidge of MODfilms by one of our Summer ’06 interns, Amy Rose. MODfilms produces “remixable” film content and technology aimed at new cinema platforms and is currently working on a film called “Sanctuary,” which will be released to the public under a CC BY-NC-SA…

As we all know, Creative Commons offers free license and tech tools to the creators for them to use to clearly signal to the public that some uses are permitted. But CC is also about more than just the actual licenses and tools — CC and the issues it raises and touches on engenders debate.…