Today I’ve been looking into Creative Commons licensing, a very interesting alternative for regular oldfashioned copyright. You can read more about why this is good for the world here.

Almost everybody licenses their content on a “non-commercial” basis. I don’t understand why actually: What’s wrong with commercial use? Your work will get more attention. That’s what it’s all about, right? Luc van Braekel (in Dutch) says he doesn’t mind content he publishes will be used commercially. I fully agree with him.

And what is “commercial use”? If I have Adwords on my blog I can’t use a Flick photo that is published under a non-commercial license? I’m not sure… I think there is a big grey zone.

This guy on a bulletin board says offering a non-commercial option is the biggest mistake Creative Commons ever made. I do think that Creative Common’s mission of “freeing culture” would have a better chance of succeeding!

Update: Just found a great post with same conclusion

Check this link: http://www.psd2html.com “You design – We Xhtml”. In non-technical terms: You deliver a picture of the website our want, they delivery a website within 8 hours for US$ 150! Great propositon!

This is serious competition for “traditional” brick and mortar web-agencies I think!

I at least was tempted to order a website, if it weren’t for the fact I’m about to hire a web developer….

On my holiday in India I finally took some time to read. I bought two books, quite different in their message. One was the very well-known `Wikinomics’ by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams. In a nutshell: Hallelujah web 2.0. Power to the people!

The other one I picked up from the bookshelves was `The cult of the amateur’ by Andrew Keen. His position (on the front cover): 2.0 is `killing our culture and assaulting our economy’.

I bought this book on purpose, to get some counterbalance for my positive vision on the rise of influence on the world by ordinary people because of the Internet.

In the first seven chapters of the book Keen talks about the internet as some plague that has come to destroy our world. The bottomline: Web 2.0 is destroying creativity and knowledge. What’s the use of getting a long education as an artist or scholar if everybody `steals’ all the work they have invested lots of money and time in anyway?

During the whole book I kept thinking `Mr. Keen, the world has changed. You can’t turn back time. Face it’. One of the many examples: Mr Keen blames universities for the many poker-addicted students, because they installed broadband internet in dorm rooms. That is just crazy, in my opinion!

And especially I kept thinking: What do you propose?

In the last chapter this becomes clear: a strict enforcing of copyright laws. And discipline by the people: stop copying music and pay for a subscription to a newspaper to guarantee independent and informed press.

Finally Keen offers some interesting ideas after all: more initiatives that mix content by experts with content from amateurs, or websites that have an expert panel that can `guarantee’ quality. I strongly agree with this!

Keen has given me food for thought. Many of the examples he gave were interesting and sometimes shocking. But this book has not changed my general idea at all, as I expected: the 6 billion people on this planet are perfectly capable of making their own decisions and cooperating with each other to make better things than we are offered now by big institutions and companies.

But perhaps I am just a hopeless optimist.

Ik ga over naar Engels op dit blog. Waarom?
> Dit is een goed moment. Ik ben vrij zeker dat ik niet al te veel mensen op mijn dak zal krijgen… (om en nabij de 500 unieke bezoekers in 2007…)
> Engels is de taal van het internet. Alhoewel ik het leuk vind om te schrijven: ik vind het nog leuker om gelezen te worden.
> Mijn werkveld gaat zich hopelijk snel uitbreiden over de grenzen. Ik vind het leuk als ook deze mensen kunnen lezen wat mij bezig houdt!