We’ve had our own beta search engine for the past six months, but it was mostly a proof of concept, to see if we could build a search engine that recorded the semantics of web page metadata. Like any proof of concept launched to the public, it was slow, frequently returned zero results, and was…

Soundclick, one of the Internet’s biggest music community sites, prominently integrated our license engine just one month ago. In that time, over 30,000 tracks have been licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Genres vary, and many of the tracks allow derivatives, so break out your music editing software and mix away. More details from the press…

There’s a been good discussion about music and Creative Commons licenses happening on the pho list the last day or so. The most novel post comes from Jim Griffin: Here’s an example from my new reality: In our neighborhood (The Plains, VA, population 266) and in our region there are many people who adopt for…

The File Sharing Experiment is a project with the goal of demonstrating how file sharing actually helps the music, movie, and software industry. Folks are encouraged to post purchases they’ve made and a short explanation of how they learned about the band/movie/game and why they ended up buying something for it. All the evidence is…

Slate is running a piece today entitled “Art Mobs” that takes a look at how collaboration between artists has changed as things move online. It covers graphical, film, and text pieces, but the best example is a song. We’ve profiled MacJams before, the site built around sharing tracks for Apple’s Garageband users. They’ve got Creative…

Renaldo “Recombo” Lemos of Creative Commons Brazil reports more good news: “Following the same steps of Gilberto Gil and Mombojo, the Brazilian electronic group Gerador Zero has decided to go Recombo. Gerador Zero is one of the most inventive music projects in Brazil. Fabio FZero, their mastermind, has managed to create music that is hard…

Lou Reed is another artist that should check out the Recombo license. Here’s a great quote from him about his most recent recordings being remixed in this story: “I’ve been getting all these great mixes sent to me out of the U.K. for years and years,” he told Attitude magazine, “and I just started saying…

People who study race, gender, and anthropology sometimes talk about “code-switching“: the way a person who straddles different cultures (poor and rich, minority and majority, north and south) learns to toggle between the lingo and mannerisms of each to survive, or in some cases, thrive. One of the several “ah ha!” moments of Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s…

Independent childrens recording artist Zak Morgan‘s second album was nominated for Grammy this year. The amazing part is that he is without any label backing: he produces his own albums, coordinates his own tours, and sells his CDs along the way. In this posting to CDBaby’s site, he tells the story of how he went…

Here’s an interesting blurb from the Stanford Report: Music Professor Chris Chafe played his celleto with Berkeley musician Roberto Morales, left, in Wallenberg Hall during an intercontinental jam session June 18 that took advantage of sophisticated teleconference technology. Projected on the screen are Hogne Moe, left, and Oyvind Berg, who “virtually” joined the concert from…