Archive for January, 2009

Creative Commons Licenses on Books

Posted in Analysis, Intellectual Property on January 25th, 2009 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

A few weeks ago Lawrence Lessig showed up The Colbert Report to plug his new book, Remix. The interview itself is quite funny. Lessig talks a bit about how traditional copyright laws don’t make sense with modern technology. My favorite part is when Colbert dares the public to remix that interview with “a great dance beat” by saying he will be “very angry and possibly litigious” with Lessig periodically interjecting saying “I’m totally fine with that” and “I give you permission.” Of course, the great dance beats have been showing up. Lessig blogged about a bunch of them. The one…

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Blogger file format converter for MovableType / Typepad

Posted in Geek, Hacks on January 18th, 2009 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

I recently blogged about my efforts to move from TypePad to Blogger. My friend Brian pointed out that Google just announced a set of tools to convert to or from popular blog export formats, including MovableType which uses the same file formats as my TypePad. The converters are open source, distributed under the Apache license, so you can download the code and run them on your local machine. Or, if your blog isn’t too big, you can run the code hosted on AppEngine by going to http://movabletype2blogger.appspot.com/ http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/ http://livejournal2blogger.appspot.com/ Well I tried this with my blog, and the resulting file…

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Bluenile Children’s Organization

Posted in Philanthropy, Seattle on January 11th, 2009 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

Seattle Times just ran a story about a local non-profit that I’m quite fond of. Blue Nile Children’s Organization has been supporting orphans in Ethiopia for years. For $30/month donors, mostly local to Seattle, provide Ethiopian children with basic necessities and access to education. Now they’re expanding the scope of their support by building a medical clinic in Addis Adaba. From the ground up. It’s quite impressive. It will be run by Ethiopian doctors, with regular visits from US and Candian physicians who will help both provide care and train the local staff in specialty procedures. If you’d like to…

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Rhapsody Profiles FTW!

Posted in Democratization of Information, Ego, Geek, Music, Social Computing on January 4th, 2009 by leodirac – 2 Comments

Excuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!! They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time. A couple of you might remember that this feature was live for something like a week in early 2007. But it was very slow and didn’t live long. Sniff. I worked hard to make this feature possible when I was working at Real. The fact that I couldn’t get it re-launched was a big motivator for me to move on to greener pastures. I saw making Rhapsody social as an important evolution of…

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