Tim O’Reilly: “William Gibson said ‘The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed.’ The shape of things to come is already implicit in a thousand small clues. Then, in a sudden shift of mindset, it becomes obvious to everyone.”

Underpinnings of Creative Commons

The project’s initial goal is to provide an easy method by which creators can indicate, in a machine-readable format, how others may use their intellectual works. The project uses JavaScript, Perl, HTML, and XML to create a web-based application for generating metadata, associated with digital works in a machine-readable format. The metadata corresponds to innovative and flexible licenses designed to help creators of intellectual works share their work with the public on generous terms. Search engines, file sharing applications, digital rights management tools, and other emerging technologies recognize the terms on which those works may be used. [More…]

What a Good Idea Department

Fed up with those three-line URLs generated by content management systems? Well, here’s an ingenious solution: MakeAShorterLink — which enables you to generate a short URL which points to an incomprehensible one. Why didn’t I think of that?