Creative Commons Technology Summit 2008
On Wednesday, Creative Commons hosted their first ever technology summit at Google. I’ve been into CC for a while now and I was relatively pleased by their progress since I last checked in.
Joi Ito started the day off with a lucid delineation of CC’s major components. He pointed out the technical side of CC is hoping to create a set of standards for digital media exchange in a similar spirit to what the IETF does for the internets as a whole. The political side of CC is more akin to the Open Internet Coalition that is fighting to keep these standards in neutral hands.
Ben then gave a great outline of the technical components of ccREL. I am impressed with the refinements and flexibility introduced by the full-scale adoption of RDFa for semantic markup.
The later sessions started to drift away from my core interests, but I was intrigued by the proliferation of digital copyright registries: Registered Commons, SafeCreative, and Noank Media, for example. It was great to see Attributor have a presence at the summit. They’re also heavy users of Hadoop—I am once again impressed by what Jim has built.
I’ve enjoyed watching Creative Commons evolve over the past several years and I’m still holding out some hope that I’ll be able to have a material impact on their success some time in the future. For now, it’s great to keep up with the team; I trust they’re in good hands with a fellow Cavalier leading the way.
