What license would I use?

I have been editing my blog about this throughout the week. I am not sure why I don't really know what I want to say about this, but after reading Kelly's blog I think I have a clearer voice.

For the most part I really like the creative commons/share alike concept. I don't think that I will every really create something that I wouldn't want someone to be able to use or expand upon to make better or just different.

But there is a side of me that then says, it might depend on what I was creating. I love being able to use things under the guise of educational, but I do want to make sure that whoever originally created gets recognized, but that is sometimes very difficult to do. People do not always post things using their real identities or give much information and it really can take a lot of effort to trace the information, at least I have found that with some images.

Now, if I spent years writing the next great American novel, I don't think I would put that out there under a creative commons license or anything similar. I would be expecting to actually make money off of that, assuming I could actually write well. But with things that I am creating in class, I really have not worried about if someone would use it or alter it. If my ideas inspire someone to take it to another level or in another direction, great.

But like Kelly, I do occasionally feel strange just putting all this information out there into the public domain. For me, it isn't that I don't want anyone to use something I create, I really don't want to share my personal things with the world. So far, I don't think my musings have gone into a personal realm I am uncomfortable with so there are no worries. I don't mind blogging about specific subjects, but I don't see myself using this as my personal diary and making that public.


In reading some of the information on Wikipedia about intellectual property, I do see there is a fine line to walk there. If we start saying that everything falls within intellectual property, how do we continue to grow and expand ideas? I don't know if anyone else saw the information about a letter Bill gates wrote chastising other code creators for taking the information he created and modifying it without giving him credit or monetary offers. I kind of found it a little funny, but do understand how after so many hours of hard work, you do deserve recognition for your efforts. If the information has been copyrighted or patented, then yes according to law there are steps you need to take to use that "item". But in the case of technology, there should be expectations that someone will take that information and expand upon it to hopefully help improve it and continue the growth.

Chirbit

In searching for audio sharing sites, I came across Chirbit. It is free to join and pretty easy to use. You can record, upload, and share sound bites, music, jokes, whatever. You can even link these to Twitter and Facebook.

When you create an account, you get your own page that looks similar to blog pages. You have a menu of anything you have uploaded or created yourself as the main part of the page. Along the side you can have things your are following or your favorites, and you can browse sound files by category. So for the random movie quotes is my favorite area.

You can upload mp3s, m4as, and wav files up to 120mb. You can also record something directly from your webcam or mic up to 2 minutes in length. There are a few things still in beta, such as uploading voice memos from iphone or google voice.

I don't know if I will use this as my primary audio sharing tool, I am still checking out other things. For music I often use Pandora, although I can no longer use it at work - uses too much bandwidth they say. If I find anything else useful and fun I will post it for everyone to check out.

Wikisource

The next Wikimedia project I checked out was Wikisource. This again had to do with books.

"Wikisource is an online library of free content textual sources, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to harbour all forms of free text, in many languages. It also provides translation efforts to this end."

Most of the books on Wikisource are free of copyright, meaning the work was published before January 1, 1923 and the author has been deceased for over 100 years, or have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

In looking around I found what is said to be Shakespeare's last will and testament. I have to say I am not sure how correct I believe it is since there is nothing citing its source or how they came across the article. When you look at the history of the page, you can see where people have made edits and changes, and for the most part they appear to be grammar or spelling corrections, but how do we know those edits are correct?

It seems that many of Shakespeare's works cited on Wikisource say doubts have been raised about its source. People are consistently editing the works of Shakespeare, but most likely from several different sources which they are not always citing, so whose to say which one might be a complete and true example?

I know that the works of Shakespeare have been altered by many people outside of Wikisource, so this is not anything new or disturbing. If you go to see an actual production, I am sure it isn't pulled just from one version. But this is where I question how authentic and accurate is the information that is being put out there?

I guess it does go to say that you should always double check the source of information and not take everything you read as absolute. That being said, it is a pretty nifty sight to explore. There are all sorts of books that I would never explore on this site and I look forward to reading some of them - for free!

Wikibooks

In looking at some of the various Wikimedia projects I decided to check out Wikibooks. I chose it because I love to read and thought it would be interesting to see what they actually did.

Wikibooks launched in 2003 as project to host and build free textbooks. I was grateful I had already read DI's suggested article on "copyleft" and "creative commons" licensing so I had a little more of an idea of what they were talking about.

Basically Wikibooks hosts some original books as well as free content books found on the internet. They work on the same concept as all the other wiki projects in that anyone can come in and alter or add information.

I checked out the humanities section and was a bit disappointed that there wasn't much there. They have a small section dedicated to technical theatre, but at least the information is pretty accurate. I have a lot of friends that I will now direct to this project to help add better content. I think that if people continue to update and information this would be a very useful tool.

Flickr

I have used Flickr to find pictures that I can use for my multimedia class, so I decided I would join. It was easy since I have a Yahoo account. Uploading images is very easy. All you have to do is choose the image and click upload.

I am not sure I like Flickr yet. The profile settings are very general and I cannot seem to add links to anything that they don't offer a blank space for. So I haven't been able to link to anything other than my CMS site. I do like like Picnik, their sister sight for editing. It is very easy to use and actually gives you quite a few options for being free.

I have used Picasa before, I liked it well enough, but I didn't want to download it on my computer again. I already have Iphoto and with Picasa I then had two copies of everything floating around and it got rather messy to figure out things were saved.

YouTube? MeTube!

Ok, the title of this blog is probably really lame, but it made me giggle when I typed it.

Anyway, to my topic...

I had created a Youtube account last semester when working on my final project for web design. I used it for only posting the one video and didn't really expect to need it again. But I have now gone in a couple of times this semester to add new videos. So when I saw that we needed to go in and create accounts, this was pretty easy.

As I was updating my profile I had to actually laugh at the section that says "describe yourself". I really wanted to put petite female wearing sweats and fuzzy socks (as that is what I am currently wearing in case you cared:)). But I thought putting this out there would definitely attract some audience members I may not want. So I have left it blank for now.

I was quite surprised how easy it was to set up and account and ad video. I think I was expecting the upload process to be a lot more complicated. I also like the privacy settings options. Currently they are set to public since I wasn't sure how else my classmates would be able to view things unless I add you all as friends/family, which I might try to see how that process works.

Once I create the other accounts I will add them to my profile page as well.

Wiki wiki wiki

So who knew there were so many things under the title of "wiki"? Obviously not me. I know about Wikipedia, but I didn't realize there was a Wiktionary, Wikiversity, there are even more than that, but I don't think I can list them all.

I do like that fact that you can use the same user name for all of the wiki-sites. It made it easy to move around between them. When I first started trying to edit information, I didn't know where to begin. I felt like I didn't have anything valid to contribute to any of the information shown. So far I have only made small contributions, but really did have fun with adding information on the CI 1516 page. There was no information on the page. There wasn't much to find and then Lucy pointed out that most people spell Pices as Pisces. So I could see how there could be confusion and multiple postings with different spellings.

In creating my profile page, I have started out small. I haven't used 10 different formatting types yet, but I am still trying to figure out what to add. Here is my beginning.