Tag: creativecommons

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SlideShare

I wanted to test out SlideShare, as I’ve seen a number of people I know post their presentations there…

I did a short presentation for Web414 in early 2007 called Lightbox JS (and Friends). I used S5 because I like S5, it’s XHTML/CSS, it’s standards-based, it lives on the web and gets indexed. Anyone with a browser can see it. It takes no special software to create or consume.

SlideShare

I managed to convert this to a format I could put into SlideShare, but it wasn’t easy. (See Lightbox JS (and Friends) on SlideShare.) This is what SlideShare has to say about formats:

We accept PowerPoint (ppt & pps), PDF, & OpenOffice (odp) files. If you are on a Mac and use Keynote, export to “PDF”.

So my complaint here is that anyone who plans put their stuff on SlideShare will most likely start with a proprietary and/or binary format. I know, I’m one of those crazy people who actually prefer HTML, but if SlideShare becomes the standard for sharing slides and presentations, it could be a bad thing.

The conversion process I went through involved doing screen captures of each page of my S5 presentation, which on the Mac created PNG files. I then converted those to PDF files, and combined them into a single PDF I could upload to SlideShare. This was a short presentation and it still took me way too long to do. What SlideShare needs is an S5 importer (or really, just an HTML importer) just give it a URL and let it import your existing presentation. That would be cool.

SlideShare is a nice service, and yes, they even support Creative Commons, which is a good thing. Hopefully they’ll continue to improve it, and eventually become supportive of us HTML-presentation freaks…




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Your Rights (You gave them away!)

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.


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Creative Commons + Milwaukee?

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?


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Large Deposits

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.)


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Backing In

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…