rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

A big congrats to Second Life for open sourcing their client. This is a big move and goes a long way to addressing things I have brought up here before. It also heads off and support the project libsecondlife.

I’m heading to Taipei, Taiwan on Monday for the CC Taiwan sponsored conference “Open & Free: New Enterprise in the Information Age — An International Workshop“. It should be fun to head east. I will also spend some time working with the CC Taiwan team on their own ccHost-based projects. I’m presenting in the collaboration section of the conference about The Open Content Library: Building Large Scale “Open” Communities around Multiple Media. I’m not speaking so much about the larger project Open Content Library, as much as about the concept of open content libraries like the Open Clip Art Library, ccMixter.org, and even good ole wikipedia.

Then, I’m back to China to Hong Kong and Guangzhou for a week off to chill. That actually means eat really good and work on Inkscape release, Open Clip Art Library and other projects. I will also go to my favorite gym and get shouted at in Mandarin in hip-hop, bellydancing, and aerobic dance classes as much as possible. Ah, I will dream about being bi-coastal in the future, as well as wanting to do an American-style road trip in China from Guangzhou to Beijing and (fly) back.

I’ll be in Taiwan from Jan 9-13 and then in Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton) from 13-20 and then back to San Francisco. Let’s connect if you are in those areas and want to do some things As always, the road goes the other way if you are in my neck of the woods (like lil wayne).

I’m in total agreement with Linksvayer’s post on how wikipedia should have textads. He makes some compelling arguments. Yesterday Mike and I looked at some graphs of statistics around this, but not around wikipedia. So, I did a lame alexa comparison of wikipedia with myspace, youtube, and facebook.

The main reason I have for supporting ads in wikipedia is to raise money for supporting free and open culture at large. We would not lose our souls over this, but would have real money to do real things. Yes, I realize now that you need money to do these things and might be another thing in 2007 I will learn even more about (which does’nt dilute my passion, involvement, nor promotion of free and open culture).

BTW, grants and fellowships are nice bits of money, but free and open culture projects need normal real money too. It will be great to figure out good ways to generate revenue to fund/hire up more open-minded people (sorry for the pun).