I came across this post today, from a guy who posted his video on YouTube, then saw it on VH1, and took the VH1 video, showing his video, and tried to show it, and… Well, go read the post….

I’ll only deal with the first part in which his video was used by VH1. When first saw one of those “web video” shows on TV months back, I knew something would go wrong. I was hoping they’d show a video that was under a non-commercial license (which would not include anything on YouTube obviously.) Well, this isn’t exactly how I saw it happening, but it’s close. Sort of. It is my belief that Christopher Knight surrendered his rights to his video when he uploaded it to YouTube. Well, more precisely, I should say that I think he granted YouTube a very liberal license do to whatever the hell they wanted to do with his videos… Below is just a snippet from the YouTube Terms of Service:

“For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.”

I’m definitely not a lawyer, but read it over, and do you see the “royalty-free… transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute… display… affiliates… business…. in any media formats and through any media channels” In other words, “You hereby grant YouTube the rights to do whatever the %$@&! they want with your content.” I mean, I can’t read that any other way.

How much do you want to bet that Viacom is an affiliate of Google/YouTube, and if they aren’t now, they will be tomorrow. Honestly, I caught a lot of crap from people because I kept saying that YouTube was bad/evil/thieves, etc. Sure, I’ve been known to promote rival services like Ourmedia and blip.tv which, you know, actually let you control your creations, and maintain your rights.

You have choices people! I’m amazed by those who get all outraged about accounts and videos being deleted. It’s a service, someone else runs it, deal with it. Get your own account, post the videos there, or on a service that is friendly to what you do. Argh…..

We may have to hold a Creative Commons Salon in Milwaukee sooner than we thought.

Milwaukee area artists, musicians, writers, photographers… Are you using Creative Commons licenses for things you create? Are you interested in learning about why you might want to use a Creative Commons license?

We are looking for people who think Creative Commons is a good thing, to share their experiences and opinions (and their work!) If we can find some folks interested in this, we might hold a Creative Commons Salon in Milwaukee.

We teach our kids to share… why shouldn’t we?

Remember two months ago, when I got a new iMac? Well, I got a phone call from my brother-in-law saying he was on his way to the Apple Store to pick up a new 20″ Apple iMac.

So we’ve got the same computer now! Well, except that in that two month span, Apple redesigned the thing and speed bumped it. For anyone new to the platform, that’s the way Apple works. Get used to it.

The last time my brother-in-law bought an iMac, Bondi Blue was a hot new color…

Welcome to the future!

Another song… this one is titled “Large Deposits” for reasons that are only clear to me. You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.

As usual, you can grab it from Ourmedia, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)

At the first BarCampMilwaukee, in 2006, someone showed up with a mini RC helicopter (I think it was Jerry?) and everyone thought it was cool. $30 at Radio Shack? Many geeks said they’d be picking one up ASAP.

So I was thinking, since Bucketworks has some major ceiling height in the warehouse section, let’s bring some mini RC helicopters and fly them around. Now, I don’t have one yet, but I’ll get one. Amazon lists a bunch, but I want to read through the reviews and try to pick a good one. You wanna fly with us? Pick up a mini RC helicopter and bring it to BarCampMilwaukee2 on Oct 13/14, 2007.

The new barcampmilwaukee.com is a site running Drupal, and I’m pretty damn impressed with it. Blake did most of the work, ok, pretty much all of the work, and I helped just a bit with the PayPal stuff and the CSS. (The site from the first BarCampMilwaukee is still available at 2006.barcampmilwaukee.com)

This site is very cool. Drupal gave us so many great features out of the box, I can’t imagine doing it from scratch without a great framework to take us most of the way there.

Just to highlight a few features, by the time we get to BarCampMilwaukee2, you should have a good idea who the other participants are and what interests you may share, the sessions people may want to see happen, what opinions people have on things, how to donate, and who donated.

I first encountered Drupal back in 2002, and back then saw it has potential, and I’m glad it’s turned into a mature system. I really want to get more into Drupal, as I keep coming across projects that might be a good match for it’s capabilities. Drupal interest in the Milwaukee area is also growing, and if we’re lucky, we may see a DrupalCampWisconsin before the end of the year.

At BarCampMilwaukee2, Blake will do a session titled BarCampMilwaukee.com in ten minutes, and I’ll definitely be there.

I’ve proposed a few sessions for BarCampMilwaukee2. I really need to stop. I don’t want to do too much, and I want others to be able to get a chance, but dammit, I just get BarCampFever sometimes!

We will be doing intro sessions to start things off, and I think it’s really important to promote Creative Commons. We are going to suggest (but not require) that people post their photos, video, code, etc. under open licenses, and try to explain why this is a Good Idea. I’ve been wanting to talk about CC to many of the locals for a while now.

This is one where I don’t know how it will go, Internet for Kids. As a total net-nerd, with kids, I may know too much about how things work, so sometimes I’m not sure what I should or should not let my kids do online. Do we follow high-tech solutions (proxies, blocking) or low-tech (sit with them and watch what they do.) Mainly looking for advice and ideas here.

And of course, Popsicle Sticks 2.0… Yeah, that’s right. You think you’ve built things with Popsicle Sticks before? Total Popsicle Sticks 1.0 - this is the Next Generation of Popsicle Stick Building! (I hope…)

Oh yeah, I also tossed out the idea of a mini-remote-control helicopter rally, and at least one person seemed totally hyped up about it. Did I mention the ceiling at Bucketworks is like 50 feet tall in the big room?

We held a Tech Cafe on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at Bucketworks. Justin brought us food and drinks, and we discussed BarCampMilwaukee2, which will take place on Oct 13/14, 2007.

Oh, the BarCampMilwaukee2 site is up and ready to go at barcampmilwaukee.com. Feel free to go there and sign up and start filling it with content. Blake did a great job on the site.

I won’t get into the details of the meeting here, since what we discussed will most likely show up on the site, and on the list, but things are going good. Bucketworks is in need of a few things, and we’re hoping we can help provide them, or find people that can.

I’ve had this argument many times with Justin… defining what exactly makes something open-source.

He is confident in telling me that Firefox is not open-source, and (as I understand it) he believes this because the Mozilla Organization, which controls the source code for Firefox, does not easily allow people to contribute code. They keep a tight grip on who was their bits put into Firefox. And while it is true that there are pieces in Firefox that you cannot use elsewhere (branding elements, graphics, etc.) I still believe that Firefox is open-source due to the fact that it uses the Mozilla Public License which is considered an open-source license by the Open Source Initiative.

I asked the question on Pownce recently, Is the Firefox web browser open-source?

And I think it’s a question that most people who have a basic understanding of the term “open-source” would answer “yes” to, but… Is that the case?

I thought maybe searching for “firefox is not open source” would unveil some great conspiracy I was not aware of, but no such luck.

Personally, I don’t think allowing people to contribute code is a requirement of open-source. It may be an important component of community and “open-ness” but accepting someone else’s code into your project does not seem to be a requirement. Providing the source code, and allowing people to modify and use that source code does seem to be a requirement, and though I’ve always downloaded binaries, I just downloaded the source code to Firefox.

So what is the scoop here? Is Firefox open-source?

I tried recording a song but I couldn’t get the drums quite right so it turned into a 30 second intro with very minimal drums and mainly guitar and bass.

Anyway, it’s called ‘Backing In’ and you can get it from Ourmedia…

I would have scrapped the whole deal, but I wasn’t about to let this thing beat me. I need to experiment with the order in which I record things. For this piece the drums came last, which has often worked in the past, but not with this one. Life is like that sometimes…

Bucketworks was a big part of making BarCampMilwaukee happen in 2006. Besides providing a venue, James (the leader of Bucketworks) got deeply involved, and he had a great time. BarCamp, with it’s un-conference like traits, is a perfect match for Bucketworks, which bills itself as “a health and fitness club for your brain”

Milwaukee is lucky to have a place like Bucketworks. For BarCampMilwaukee2 some of us are pitching in to help get the place ready. They just moved to a new building, and there is a lot of freakin’ work to do. Last weekend a few of us were there wiring the joint up, pulling ethernet through the ceiling and walls. Once that is complete, we’ll be adding wifi all around. Personally I’d like to see Bucketworks become the place for Milwaukee’s tech/art community to gather.

Who pays for all this? Members do pay a fee, but it’s ridiculously cheap in order to be affordable for everyone. Bucketworks isn’t a huge money making venture. Right now they are trying to raise money for the relocation, and they’ve got 6 people (I’m one of them) who have contributed just $360. Bucketworks is a non-profit, and donating will help ensure they stick around, so help if you can.

(You can see some photos of the new location on Flickr. If you’re lucky, I’ll have a video up soon. If you’re really lucky, you’ll attend Web414 and take the tour.)

If you’re willing to help, get in touch with me. Right now we plan on being there Sept. 1st, 2007 to do more wiring, and see what else we can do to prep for BarCampMilwaukee2, and every day at Bucketworks.

On this day, ten years ago, a weblog named RasterWeb! appeared for the first time on the internet.

Today, it is one of the the longest continuing running weblogs on the Internet.

This site may have played a big role in several important trends.

• It may have helped bootstrap the blogging world.
• It was the one of the early sites involved in podcasting.

Ok, with apologies to Dave Winer for the above, this is the 10 year anniversary of this weblog. When I say that, I mean that this is one of the original blogs. If you go to jjg’s the page of only weblogs and look at “ye olde skool” list, those are the folks who were around at the same time, pre-2000, and blogging regularly. Follow those links today, and many are gone, some are still around but on hiatus, and many have lost their archives due to moving to different weblog systems over the years. Scripting News started in April 1997, CamWorld in June of 1997, and RasterWeb! in August of 1997. For each of those you can still get to the archives, and the first posts. I consider this somewhat important. We’re bloggers, who believe in the long-term. I’ve seen people who say they’ve been blogging since 1996, and when pushed they say how they had a journal or a Geocities site that is long gone, or they changed sites 5 times or whatever. Blogging is somewhat about the permanence, the fact that you stand behind what you say, and people can link to it, and that link is gonna be there a month or a year, or 5 years later. I worked meticulously to re-write any links when I moved from zymm.com to rasterweb.net many years back. My first thought, as a blogger, was that I didn’t want to break the links of people who linked to things I was saying. I hated when big media sites did it, so I didn’t want to.

So while Dave Winer and Cameron Barrett are pretty well known, I am definitely not “internet famous” in any way. I don’t live in California, or New York, and haven’t done anything amazing to bring attention to myself, I’ve just been blogging for 10 years. I’m probably most well known as being the guy who told Drew (of Dawn and Drew fame) that he should try podcasting. That’s just fine with me. I’ve gotten a lot out of blogging over the years. No, it didn’t help me get a job when I needed one, or make any amazing business deals, but what it has done is help connect me with many amazing people over the years, people I consider my friends. This to me is much more valuable than anything else, the connections I’ve made, and the people I’ve met. That’s what it’s all about.

Now, on a less serious note, I’ve take Cam out of the list of “continually running weblogs” since he often goes months without a post, and then may only have 1 in a month, so really, after Dave’s Scripting News, I think RasterWeb! is the second longest continually running weblog on the internet with all archives still available and all old links still working” So there. As soon as Dave quits, I will earn the title! And that’s the real reason I keep doing this. (But not really, I’m just kidding about that part.)

So that’s it. 10 years. I look forward to another 10. See ya on the internets…

Cool app of the week: vCard to CSV Converter.

We needed to print custom labels, so we had someone use Apple’s Address Book.app and clean up all the addresses, and then export them all as a .vcf file. From there I used the vCard to CSV Converter (running locally on my machine) to covert the .vcf file into a .csv file. Once that was done, it was pretty trivial to write some Perl-fu to take the .csv file and spit out an XPress tag file we could flow into QuarkXPress so the custom styles were applied. (Hey, we’re designers, we care about things like typefaces, leading, tracking, etc.)

The biggest problem was that I could not create multiple automatic linked text boxes in QuarkXPress 6.5. This is probably a limitation of XPress, but I worked around it by just using a single automated text box and then calculating the size of the lines in the addresses and adding blank lines accordingly. Oh, we also printed them on label sheets that were 8.75 inches by 11.5 inches, just for an added measure of fun.

Look, I’m not saying my kids are geniuses or anything (well, they are) but years back they were really into Neopets, then it got acquire for $160 Million. Now for the last few months they’ve been really into Club Penguin, and that just got acquired for like $700 Million.

I think I should start looking to them for financial advice.

I came up with a few logo ideas for BarCampMilwaukee2.

None of these should be considered final in any way, I just wanted to get the ball rolling. I expect others to pitch some ideas out there so we can do this in a collaborative way. With that said, if you have ideas, comments or suggestions, feel free to leave them here, on the Flickr page, or join the BarCampMilwaukee mailing list.