Skip to content

Category: Technology

Koblo: Online Music Collaboration

Open Culture, Technology

Koblo is a new online music collaboration site that utilizes CC licensing on tracks and song stems to promote community remixing and reuse. Uniquely, Koblo exists beyond the web in the form of Koblo Studio, a free and opensource software DAW that has the ability to upload projects to Koblo’s community site with all the…

Bandcamp Integrates CC-Licenses

Open Culture, Technology

Bandcamp, a feature-heavy music site that focuses on providing musicians with robust, easy-to-use, and visually pleasing artist pages, just integrated CC licensing options in to their UI: Hugs and kisses backatchu JD, and everyone else who requested Creative Commons support, then patiently worked around its absence by putting CC links in their tracks’ credits or…

New web metadata validator released

Technology

(This was originally published on CC Labs.) This past summer, Hugo Dworak worked with us (thanks to Google Summer of Code) on a new validator. This work was greatly overdue, and we are very pleased that Google could fund Hugo to work on it. Our previous validator had not been updated to reflect our new…

WIRED on Arduino and Open Source Computing

Technology

WIRED Magazine just published a fascinating article by Clive Thompson on Arduino, a company that manufactures an open source computing platform of the same name. Schematics for the Arduino chip are released under a CC BY-SA license, meaning that home-brewed Arduino chips have popped up in “open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitar amplifiers, and even…

RDFa now a W3C recommendation; message from Hal Abelson

Technology

Yesterday RDFa, a technical standard Creative Commons has championed at the World Wide Web Consortium for five years, was made a W3C Recommendation — a standard for the web to build upon. CC founding board member and MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson sends this message: Dear Staff and Board, I’m writing with some great…

Adobe continues to do the right thing with XMP

Technology

XMP is the format Creative Commons recommends for embedding metadata (such as licensing information) in most media file types. Frankly there isn’t much competition — embedded metadata is poorly supported, formats are balkanized, and nobody save Adobe (XMP’s developer) has had the willingness to work on a problem that can only be solved over many…

CC in the TypePad Widget Gallery

Technology

We mentioned last year that SixApart had developed a CC licensing widget for their TypePad hosted blogging service, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it’s a really nice implementation. The CC widget is now available via the TypePad Widget Gallery. If you have a TypePad blog you can visit the gallery or the widget directly…

RDFa goes to W3C Proposed Recommendation

Technology

Yesterday RDFa reached Proposed Recommendation status at the World Wide Web Consortium, the final stage before becoming a W3C Recommendation. Using RDFa, one can make data in web pages rendered for humans also readable in a meaningful way by computers. This is important to Creative Commons, as we have always seen the promise of the…

Picasa Now Supports Creative Commons

Technology

This week Google threw its hat into the photo-commons ring with by announcing its newly upgraded Picasa Web Albums service. Users of Picasa now have the option to individually license their photos on the site under any of our six licenses, and can also set their profile to default to a particular one: Just look…