We’re very excited to announce the first CC Salon, taking place in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 8 from 6pm-9pm at Shine (1337 Mission Street). In the spirit of gatherings organized by groups like Remix Reading, Dorkbot, and Copynight, CC Salon will be a casual affair focused on conversation and community-building open to anyone interested…

Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer are the members of The Lonely Island, an LA-based comedy collective, who have released much of their music and video shorts online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Also known as “the dudes”, Andy, Jorma and Akiva soon found that they were developing a fan base, some of…

On first glance — brown hair, pale skin, and undergrad-style clothes — Rich Baraniuk looks like an average guy. But look at his eyes, and you know you’re in the presence of something rare. They’re giant and brown and fairly glowing with the light of the millions of synapses firing at the same instant. They’re…

Wiley Wiggins has starred in the films Dazed and Confused, Waking Life (on which he also worked as an animator), and Frontier. Wiggins was a contributing editor to the late, great FringeWare Review. His collection of short Stories, Solarcon-6, is available for free under a Creative Commons license from his website (also licensed!). We caught…

MediaRights.org is an innovative non-profit, based in New York, but accessible around the world via their website that helps to showcase important social issue documentaries and puts media makers, educators, librarians, nonprofits, and activists in contact with each other to enable the use of documentaries to generate discussion and encourage action on contemporary social issues.…

Magnatune provides “Internet music without the guilt.” Based in Berkeley, California, Magnatune is a record label with a 21st Century business model, offering consumers a unique mix of free and paid music. One of the first for-profit companies to adopt Creative Commons’ copyright licenses into its strategy, Magnatune has amassed both an impressive buzz and…

Fading Ways is a Canada & UK indie-label that has international reach. In addition to having national distribution throughout Canada, FW is distributed in several European countries and its UK operation have recently launched an online music store. Fading Ways also utilizes an innovative marketing approach with “street teams” of fans (see: 1, 2) based…

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown…

I got to feeling like I was someone special — not everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin’ Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can’t say for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he’d liked…

You may have read this Featured Commoner’s technology columns in the San Jose Mercury Sun News or on Sillicon Valley.com. Dan Gillmor has been writing about technology, business, and policy for as long as such a beat has existed. His new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, tells the…