This week’s featured content is Electrobel, a massive music community site for Belgian electronic music of all genres. There are over 2000 Creative Commons licensed tracks available for streaming and downloading. The site has an impressive array of features as well. Check out music by genre, by artist, or by song (the little diskette icon…

There’s a nice piece in the NYTimes about the increased levels of public participation in recent Mars landings. A big part of the reason is that given a large, interested population with broadband connections, NASA officials have done their best to share every bit of data, image, and video they can online, and as a…

An interesting contest has just opened for entries, called Fusedspace. “An international design competition on innovative applications for new technology in the public domain” is how they describe themselves but keep in mind the term “public domain” in this case is more specific to public spaces. The contest is set to give away over 17…

The New York Times Magazine mentions Creative Commons in a long piece about copyright reform this week. The article seems to be aimed at a general overview of the movement and forgets a few key details, like Richard Stallman being the man behind Copyleft.

Victor Stone, previously mentioned here for his great remixes on our last CD, recently signed onto Magnatune with a plethora of remixed tracks from Magnatune itself. He also recently launched a site dedicated to sharing tips and reviews of the software he uses when creating music. A post definitely worth sharing here is the one…

Stanford is bringing back its popular Discovering Dickens community reading project — another example of what’s possible with a healthy public domain. (In other words, don’t try this with anything much more modern.) In December 2002, Stanford’s Discovering Dickens project began with the serial release of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. By the time the…

Independent musicians looking for a way to get paid for their work might want to check out Pump Audio. They serve as a marketplace of independent music for film, tv, and radio, representing thousands of independent artists. The thing that really makes them stand out is that they don’t assert control of an artist’s copyright,…

This week’s featured content is Nomads’ Land, a site for photographs taken by Jean-François Maïon during travels around the globe. A great place to start exploring the site is the map on the main page. All 1000+ photos are licensed under a Creative Commons license and we can wait to see where Jean-François travels to…

Participatory creativity is hot, hot. The Lollapoola Mash-Up Contest. Our Own GET CREATIVE! Moving Images Contest (winners to be announced next month). MoveOn.org’s Bush in 30 Seconds advertisement contest. And now even the New Yorker has announced the winner of its own analog-version of an open-source creativity contest, which was more interactive than contests past.…

NPR’s Science Friday last week spoke with Howard Chang, of Stanford Medical School’s Biochemistry Department. Chang discussed his recent article, co-authored with several colleagues and published in the Public Library of Science Biology open-access journal, which explores how scientists can learn about cancer from studying the way common wounds heal. Like all PLoS publications, Chang…