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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Creative Commons uses Semantic Media Wiki for both our external wiki and our internal task and project management system. As opposed to a normal wiki where text is “flat”, the text and data inside a SMW can be structured in sophisticated ways that allow for meaningful querying of knowledge statements of the corpus. To give a…

The Mozilla Concept Series is a recently announced initiative from Mozilla to garner greater participation in creating their newest browser, Aurora. While there are some intriguing inaugural designs, the most engaging part of the project is that Mozilla is pooling the greater web community for submissions in the form of ideas, mockups (textual/visual examples), and…

Microsoft and Creative Commons have teamed up to release the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office, a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licenses to works created in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users…

Microsoft and Creative Commons have teamed up to release the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office, a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licenses to works created in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users…